William D. Cohan is a contributing editor at Fortune and former award-winning investigative newspaper reporter 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.
In April, 2007 he published his book The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. (Doubleday). The book won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award on October 25, 2007.
He is currently working on a book about former Westar Energy chief David Wittig.
His book House of Cards, describing the last days of Bear Stearns & Co., was published in March 2009. The book has received good reviews. It was described as a "masterfully reported account" by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times.
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. 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."
He is the brother of Peter Cohan.
He graduated from Duke University.
He is the father of Teddy Cohan, Quentin Cohan and the husband of Deb Futter