# William D. Cohan

William David Cohan (born 1960) is an American business writer.

## Early life and education

Cohan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 20, 1960. His father was an accountant and his mother worked in administration. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

## Career

Cohan was an investigative reporter for the Raleigh Times. He then worked on Wall Street for seventeen years as a mergers and acquisitions banker. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York, then Merrill Lynch, and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Since 2013, he has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.
He is a distinguished author known for his acclaimed works delving into the intricacies of Wall Street. Among his notable publications are "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World," "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street," and "The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.," which earned him the prestigious 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His exploration of the Duke lacrosse scandal, "The Price of Silence," became a New York Times bestseller upon its release in April 2014. In February 2017, he added "Why Wall Street Matters" to his repertoire, published by Random House. His more personal work, "Four Friends," offers insight into the lives of four high school companions and was published by Flatiron Press in July 2019.
His latest endeavour, "Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon," released in November 2022, chronicles the remarkable ascent and sudden decline of the General Electric Company, once revered as the world's most valuable and esteemed corporation.
Formerly serving as a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, Cohan co-founded Puck, a daily digital news and opinion platform, where his focus remains on Wall Street and broader business matters. His expertise extends to various publications including The New York Times, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, among others. Cohan has contributed columns to DealBook at The New York Times and BloombergView. He frequently provides analysis on networks like CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and BBC-TV, and has made appearances on renowned shows such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Charlie Rose Show, and CBS This Morning. Additionally, he is a sought-after guest on NPR, BBC, and Bloomberg radio programs. Formerly, he served as a contributing editor on Bloomberg TV.

## Vanity Fair controversy

In 2019, Cohan alleged the possibility that US president Donald Trump or someone close to him had used advance knowledge of political developments to profit from insider trading, publicized in two articles for Vanity Fair titled "'Who Knew Trump Would Offer a Truce With Xi?': The Mystery of the Wall Street Trump Trades" and "'There Is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On': The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the Trump Chaos Trades". Cohan's second article caused congressional representatives Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice to call for a federal investigation, but several experts interviewed by Bloomberg News questioned the evidence, while Cohan stood by the article but distanced himself from the implied conclusion ("I don’t make any allegations, I don’t know what really happened"). Writing in Slate, Felix Salmon called Cohan's articles "bullshit", arguing that he had no evidence that the trades in question were unusual, or that they had yielded the alleged profits, or that insider knowledge had been involved at all. Further, Terry Duffy, the CEO of CME Group, the company that operates the exchange where the futures are traded, questioned Cohan's understanding of the data: “[Cohan] mistakenly summed up all volume for those derivatives during spans of time and implausibly attributed that buying and selling, spread across thousands of transactions, to a single bad actor or group of cheaters." Cohan's piece, however, is explicit that the trades may have been carried out by many individuals and that "There is no way ... to know who is making these trades. But regulators know or can find out."

## Personal life

In 1991 he married editor Deborah Gail Futter in a Jewish ceremony.

## Books

* The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (2007). Winner, Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
* House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (2009). The last days of Bear Stearns & Co. In a talk about the book at Cal State Long Beach, Cohan said he felt it was his mission to get a response to questions left unanswered by Wall Street CEOs.
* Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World (2011). Examines the historical role and influence of Goldman Sachs.
* The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities (2014). The story of the Duke lacrosse case.
* Why Wall Street Matters (2017).
* Four Friends: Promising Lives Cut Short (2019). Portraits of Cohan's boarding school roommates at Andover: John F. Kennedy, Jr., Jack Berman, Will Daniel, and Harry Bull.
* Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon (2022). 798 pp. About the General Electric Company.