Bill Cohan, Columnist

Good Times Roll Again in the Hamptons

September 11, 2013 at 5:37 PM UTC

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. 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. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

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The most disappointing fact about how little things have changed on Wall Street five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is not that the Dodd-Frank Act is ineffective. Or that no substantive regulations are in place that might prevent the recurrence of a crisis. Or that no Wall Street executive has been held even remotely accountable for failing to manage his firm effectively. Or even that the Federal Reserve’s easing policies have mostly propped up Wall Street banks at the expense of American savers.

No, what is most appalling about the state of play on Wall Street in September 2013 is how much it resembles the state of play on Wall Street in September 2006, when markets were booming, profits were high, and bankers, traders and executives were getting paid small fortunes just to do their jobs. Mostly that meant they were rewarded to take risks with other people’s money.