William D. Cohan Quotes

United States, Writer
February 20, 1960

William David Cohan is an American business writer. He 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 & Co., and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

Is there any fairness in a system where a group of people can borrow a bunch of money to buy a company and pay themselves millions of dollars in dividends and fees, while the company itself ends up bankrupt and its employees lose their jobs, health insurance and pensions?

William D. Cohan
- People
- Fairness
- Employee
Because I wrote a book about Goldman Sachs. And I know that, from talking to people at Goldman Sachs, that Trump is the poster child for the kind of client they don't want to do business with, mainly because he would borrow all this money from Wall Street to build his casinos, and then didn't pay it back.

William D. Cohan
- People
- Children
- Book

People are pretty simple: they do what they are rewarded for doing. If they get multimillion-dollar bonuses by taking huge risks with other people's money - as they still do - then they will continue to take those huge risks, and not give it another thought.

William D. Cohan
- People
- Giving
- Simple
Having worked at four separate Wall Street firms, having seen a variety of talent at those places, and having competed against Goldman as a banker, one thing you have to be struck by is the power of their recruiting.

William D. Cohan
- Wall
- Talent
- Variety
Generally speaking, they have as many stars as other firms, but they are low-key about it, because that's not the Goldman way, but their bench is a lot deeper. I think Goldman has as many A players, but more importantly they have fewer C players. And no firm, I have noticed, has the depth anywhere like that.

William D. Cohan
The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms-Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns-was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day-to-day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms' ongoing reputation in the marketplace.

William D. Cohan
- Brother
- Wall
- Secret