William D. Cohan is a contributing editor at Fortune, and award-winning former investigative newspaper reporter based in Raleigh, North Carolina, who worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York. He is the brother of Peter Cohan. He graduated from Duke University.
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In 2007 he published The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., about Lazard Frères. It won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
His book House of Cards, describing the last days of Bear Stearns & Co., was published in March 2009. The book has received good reviews, described as a "masterfully reported account" by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times.[1]
In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Cohan said in March 2009 that Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz and Lehman CEO Dick Fuld had engaged in a "tsunami of excuses" when they were responsible for their firms' collapse.[2] In another op-ed written with Sandy B. Lewis in June he said that the current economic crisis is not over yet, and that "many of the fixes that the Obama administration has proposed will do little to address them and may make them worse."[3]
His 2011 book, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, examines the historical role and influence of Goldman Sachs. (He appeared on the Daily Show on 28 April 2011 to discuss the book.[4]