William D. Cohan

William David Cohan
Born (1960-02-20) February 20, 1960 (age 66)
Worcester, Massachusetts
EducationPhillips Academy
Duke University
Columbia School of Journalism
Columbia University Graduate School of Business
Occupationsfinancial journalist
Previously:
mergers and acquisitions
banker
Notable workThe Price of Silence (2014)
Money and Power (2011)
House of Cards (2009)
The Last Tycoons (2007)
Spouse
Deborah Gail Futter
​
(m. 1991)​
RelativesPeter Cohan, brother
Awards2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The Last Tycoons
WebsiteWilliamCohan.com

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 been a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.

His books include Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, Why Wall Street Matters, Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon, and The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., for which he won the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Controversy

Price of Silence

Cohan authored "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities" about the Duke lacrosse rape hoax. It has been criticized for false claims, no new evidence, overreliance on disbarred and disgraced DA, Mike Nifong, and fringe theories. Cohan, after speaking with Crystal Mangum stated, "that I am convinced something happened." In 2024, Mangum finally confessed to fabricating the rape, and falsely accusing the players. Cohan has not printed any correction or publicly acknowledged Mangum's statement.

Trump Vanity Fair Article

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."

Personal life

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

Books

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Search Results | City of Worcester, MA
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Ms. Futter Weds William D. Cohan - The New York Times
  3. ↑ https://www.newsobserver.com/2014/03/28/3740801/in-new-book-mike-nifong-speaks.html
  4. ↑ https://newrepublic.com/article/117383/william-d-cohans-duke-lacrosse-case-book-gets-many-things-wrong
  5. ↑ https://www.commentary.org/articles/kc-johnson/the-hazards-of-duke/
  6. ↑ https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/04/william-cohan-interview-duke-lacrosse-rape-scandal.html
  7. ↑ https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/14/us/crystal-mangum-duke-lacrosse-allegations/index.html
  8. 1 2 Salmon, Felix (2019-10-17). "Don't Believe Vanity Fair's Story About Futures Traders Making Billions Off of Trump Chaos". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2019-10-19.
  9. ↑ "Analysts Have a Few Problems With Trump 'Chaos Trades' Article". Bloomberg. 2019-10-18.
  10. ↑ "Vanity Fair's Trump Trade Story 'Nonsensical,' Exchange CEO Says". Bloomberg. 2019-10-24.
  11. ↑ Rutten, Tim (March 6, 2009). "'House of Cards' by William D. Cohan". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 17, 2009.
  12. ↑ Rider, Tiffany (November 23, 2009). "Former banker examines US financial meltdown; Cohan says his mission is to get a response to questions left unanswered by Wall Street CEOs". Daily 49er. Vol. LIX, no. 177. www.daily49er.com. Retrieved 2014-05-22.
  13. ↑ "Long on chutzpah, short on friends; Goldman Sachs". The Economist [US]. 16 April 2011. p. 88(US). Retrieved 2012-03-04.
  14. ↑ "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities". Scribner. Retrieved 20 May 2014.
  15. ↑ "Four Friends". Macmillan Publishers. Retrieved 28 March 2019.