­­William D. Cohan, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the New York Times bestselling 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., the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His book, The Price of Silence, about the Duke lacrosse scandal was published in April 2014 and was also a New York Times bestseller. His book, Why Wall Street Matters, was published by Random House in February 2017.  His most recent book, Four Friends, about four of his friends from high school and what happened to them in their lives, was published in July 2019 by Flatiron Press. His new book, to be published in November 2022, is titled Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon. It is about the astounding rise and precipitous fall of the General Electric Company, once the world’s most valuable and respected company.

A former longtime special correspondent at Vanity Fair, he is a founding partner of Puck, a daily digital news and opinion publication. His focus at Puck is on Wall Street and the business world, writ large. He is a former columnist for the DealBook section of the New York Times. He also writes for The Financial Times, The New York Times, Air Mail, Barron’s, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, Town & Country, The Nation, Fortune, The Hollywood Reporter, and Politico, among other publications. He previously wrote a bi-weekly opinion column for The New York Times and an opinion column for BloombergView. He also appears regularly on CNN, on CNBC, where is a contributor, on MSNBC and the BBC-TV. He has also appeared three times as a guest on the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, and CBS This Morning as well as on numerous NPR, BBC and Bloomberg radio programs. He was formerly a contributing editor on Bloomberg TV.

He is a graduate of Phillips Academy, Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts and now lives in New York City and upstate New York with his wife and, on occasion these days, their two sons.