William D Cohan

Anyone on Wall Street who has spent time restructuring the debt of bankrupt companies knows exactly why the politicians in Washington have proved so inept in their attempts to get a comprehensive deal to cut government spending, raise taxes and increase the debt ceiling.

As if it weren’t difficult enough to find a job in this still-struggling economy, prospective employees have a new hurdle to overcome: the dreaded -- and highly sophisticated -- social-media background check.

Hold on for just a New York minute now and consider the powerfully serious message the bond market sent last week about the political dithering in Washington and in Europe’s capitals. “Pay attention folks,” as the investor Gifford Combs e-mailed me on Friday. “This is not a drill.”

As should be abundantly clear by now to anyone who has taken the time to study things carefully, there were many factors that contributed to the calamitous financial crisis of the last three years.

Bloomberg's Bob Ivry and William Cohan, a Bloomberg contributing editor, talk about Goldman Sachs & Co.'s $15 billion loan from the U.S. Federal Reserve in 2008, the biggest single loan from a little-known lending program whose details have been secret until today.

Since U.S. lawmakers are no doubt feeling very sorry for themselves this week -- having to work and everything -- their first order of business should be to gobble up some low-hanging fruit.

William Cohan, author of "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor, discusses his latest Bloomberg View column about President Barack Obama's administration policy on Wall Street.

As we head into the 2012 presidential election cycle, the new, official Obama administration policy on Wall Street is crystalline: Hands off the bad guys.

Those hoping for a measure of justice for the Wall Street executives who brought us the financial crisis won’t be finding it anytime soon in the downtown Manhattan federal courtroom of Judge Barbara S. Jones.

You didn’t really think Goldman Sachs Group Inc. would go down without a fight now did you? Of course not. So it should come as little surprise that recently Goldman has started to push back hard against its nemesis, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and his narrative that the firm is the lead villain of the financial crisis.