James D. Robinson III, who as leader government of the American Express Company from 1977 to 1993 helped change into Wall Street right into a extra aggressive monetary market, with a large variety of companies housed below unmarried roofs, died on Monday in Rosalyn, N.Y., on Long Island. He was once 88.
The dying, at a health facility, was once led to through respiration failure from recurrent pneumonia, Walter Montgomery, a spokesman for the circle of relatives, wrote in a statement.
A soft-spoken son of the Georgia gentry, Mr. Robinson adopted a well-worn trail to monetary good fortune, energy and affect: from non-public faculty to the Ivy League after which directly to the moneyed canyons of Lower Manhattan, with aspect journeys to the corridors of Capitol Hill.
In Washington, he was once amongst Wall Street’s maximum influential advocates for deregulating the monetary business and widening its horizons. Some referred to as him the unofficial secretary of state for company America.
The deregulation he fought for was once in large part achieved with Congress’s repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law in 1999. As a outcome, industrial banks become empowered to underwrite and industry company securities and personal insurance coverage corporations.
This cultural shift additionally induced the securities business to reply with more and more subtle and complicated computer-enabled merchandise. Among them have been extremely leveraged derivatives that figured importantly available in the market meltdown of 2008.
But whilst Mr. Robinson therefore said that monetary deregulation “went too far,” he by no means argued for the reimposition of Glass-Steagall restrictions, which had erected a wall between funding banking and retail banks.
Mr. Robinson will have been splendid identified to the general public for his function within the epic $25 billion combat for regulate of RJR Nabisco in 1988 and his dismissal through disgruntled shareholders.
In the Nabisco episode, an Amex-owned funding company, Shearson Lehman Hutton, was once the monetary backer of an RJR Nabisco control staff that sought to regulate the corporate in a bidding battle that was once in the end received through Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company.
“I was a facilitator trying to bring the sides together,” Mr. Robinson stated in an interview for this obituary in 2016.
That takeover stood as the largest trade deal on document for nearly a decade and was once referred to as through some the excessive level of a brand new gilded age.
The fight was once chronicled in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s best-selling 1989 ebook, “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco.” The ebook was once the root of a 1993 HBO film wherein Mr. Robinson was once performed through Fred D. Thompson, who later become a United States senator from Tennessee.
Mr. Robinson’s profession was once maximum outlined through his striking American Express in the leading edge of his period’s company boundary-stretching.
“We coined the term ‘diversified financial services industry,’” Mr. Robinson stated within the interview, in his Midtown Manhattan place of business (the place an summary portray through Frank Sinatra held on a wall).
During his tenure, the American Express commute and charge-card empire expanded to incorporate Shearson Lehman Hutton; First Data Corporation, a bills worry; Investors Diversified Services, a mutual fund corporate; and the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company. American Express additionally operated a global financial institution.
Mr. Robinson made an unsuccessful bid in 1978 for the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company and at one level thought to be obtaining the Walt Disney Company.
But the prosperity of the past due Nineteen Eighties and early ’90s become what he referred to as a “dark period” because the inventory marketplace and brokerage trade slumped and traders, in what become referred to as the “Boston fee party,” revolted national over the excessive value of accepting American Express playing cards.
The insurrection pressured the corporate to chop its so-called cut price price — about 4 % in line with transaction — to check that of its credit-card competition, that have been charging one-third as a lot.
Disgruntled stockholders and administrators pressured Mr. Robinson to renounce in 1993, at 57.
Within a 12 months he had joined his son and Stuart J. Ellman to shape RRE Ventures, a New York challenge capital company making an investment in new information-technology corporations.
His ouster from American Express got here a decade after he had presided over the burdened departure of Sanford I. Weill, the Wall Street titan whose securities empire have been absorbed through American Express below Mr. Robinson.
The brash, Brooklyn-born Mr. Weill, who began his Wall Street profession as a messenger, and Mr. Robinson, a patrician Georgian, made a cultural extraordinary couple. When Mr. Weill’s proposal to shop for Fireman’s Fund, which he headed, was once rejected through the Amex board, he made up our minds he needed to go away.
Mr. Weill concept Mr. Robinson bureaucratic and indecisive. But within the 2016 interview, Mr. Robinson challenged a broadly held trust that Mr. Weill was once the risk-taker and that he was once risk-averse. Actually, Mr. Robinson contended, “it was the opposite.”
James Dixon Robinson III — also known as “Jimmy three sticks” as a result of his use of Roman numerals — was once born on Nov. 19, 1935, in Atlanta to James Dixon Robinson Jr. and Josephine (Crawford) Robinson. The son and grandson of outstanding Georgia bankers — his father was once chairman of First National Bank of Atlanta — he grew up with two sisters within the town’s prosperous Buckhead district.
One neighbor, the distinguished golfer Bobby Jones, helped encourage Jimmy to begin taking part in the sport at 8, providing the occasional tip. His 2016 curriculum vitae indexed seven golfing membership memberships, together with Augusta National (based through Jones), and 9 former golfing membership memberships.
After attending Woodberry Forest, a non-public faculty in Virginia, Mr. Robinson enrolled as an afternoon pupil on the Georgia Institute of Technology, the place he studied business control. After graduating in 1957, he joined the Navy, which assigned him to the nuclear submarine base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a disbursing officer, or paymaster. In the period in-between he took New York Stock Exchange correspondence classes. That identical 12 months he married Bettye Bradley, with whom he had two youngsters.
After his discharge in 1959, Mr. Robinson enrolled on the Harvard Business School and earned an M.B.A. in 1961. He started his trade profession at Morgan Guaranty Trust Company and after 5 years was once named assistant to the manager government, Thomas S. Gates Jr.
In 1968, Mr. Robinson become a spouse at White Weld & Company, the place he evolved an pastime in challenge capital. He joined American Express in 1970 as an government vp, recruited through Eugene R. Black Sr., an Atlanta local, Amex director and previous head of the World Bank. Mr. Robinson become president in 1975 and chairman and leader government in 1977.
He was once additionally chairman and leader government of Shearson Lehman Brothers, American Express’s brokerage subsidiary.
He resigned in early 1993 after a boardroom combat over his proceeding within the process. Major shareholders sought his ouster. The Times reported that he had left in the back of an organization with “crumbling morale,” erratic income and losses, and a declining inventory worth. Analysts, buyers, some board contributors or even his predecessor, Howard L. Clark Sr., had became in opposition to him.
His marriage to Ms. Bradley resulted in 1983 after she had an incapacitating mind aneurysm, he stated, and requested for a divorce.
In 1984, he married Linda Gosden, a high-profile public members of the family government 17 years his junior, who later instructed him all through the RJR Nabisco combat. She is the daughter of Freeman F. Gosden, co-creator and a voice of the radio program “Amos ‘n’ Andy.” As he become lively in philanthropies and fund-raising for Republican applicants, Mr. Robinson and his spouse become outstanding contributors of a glittering New York social scene, residing on the famously unique deal with 778 Park Avenue.
He is survived through his spouse; his two youngsters from his first marriage, James IV and Emily Cook; two youngsters from his 2d marriage, Nicholas and Olivia Robinson; his sister, Frances Huber; and 6 grandchildren. Mr. Robinson lived on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
At 80, when requested when he deliberate to retire, Mr. Robinson stated, “Three years after I’m dead.” He added that if his desires for technological growth have been learned, “I may be able to deliver on that.”
Robert D. Hershey Jr., a reporter who for a few years coated Wall Street finance and economics for The Times, died in January. Alex Traub contributed reporting.
