I am reading Bill Cohan’s book on Goldman Sachs (yes,
despite the ridiculous title—Money
and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World—and the
gaudy cover art in which some silly gilded “Moneybags” font sits astride a
slightly flattened and cowering satellite image of the Earth). Sorry to report the
book is really quite bad, but then I should have known, because Cohan’s previous book about Bear Stearns
was really mediocre. It was very obviously rushed out to capitalize on the morbid fascination with the financial crisis (“disaster porn,” perhaps as
something to read for “disaster tourists” a la Michael Lewis). Every paragraph of
the Bear book was the same: a short introductory sentence followed by six or
seven lines of unedited interview transcripts. You can just imagine Cohan and
his assistants running around with scissors and glue to make that monstrosity.