In conversation with Anthony Scaramucci.
12:10 – 1:00 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
About the author
William D. Cohan, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the New York Times best-selling author of three non-fiction narratives about Wall Street: 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. He is also the author of The Price of Silence; Why Wall Street Matters; Four Friends; and Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.
Cohan is a founding partner of Puck, a digital publication owned and operated by journalists, and a writer-at-large for Air Mail. He was a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and has written for ProPublica, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Institutional Investor, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, BloombergView, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Nation, Fortune, Politico, ArtNews, and Barron’s. He appears on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, and BBC-TV. He has been a guest on the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, CBS This Morning, NPR, and Bloomberg radio, among others.
Cohan is a graduate of Phillips Academy (Andover), Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, and lives in New York City with his wife and his two sons.
MFOB featured book: Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon
Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon covers the dramatic rise—and unimaginable fall—of what was once America’s most iconic corporation, General Electric, which consistently embodied American ingenuity, innovation, and industrial power. Under Jack Welch, its legendary CEO, GE was envied for its financial and management prowess and became the world’s most valuable and most admired company. But even at the height of GE’s prestige and influence, cracks were forming in its formidable foundation.
The company embodied both the muscle of American business — entrepreneurial drive, inventiveness, financial legerdemain — and its weaknesses — unchecked egos, grandiosity, hubris, and corruption. Power Failure argues that the incredible story of GE’s rise and fall is a prism through which we can better understand American capitalism. It punctures the myth of GE, exploring in a rich narrative how a once-great company wound up broken and in tatters and reminds us that if the mighty GE can disappear after 130 years, the same thing can happen to other seemingly invulnerable corporate nation-states such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google. A cautionary tale for the ages.
