The bestselling author of the acclaimed House of Cards and The Last Tycoons turns his spotlight on to Goldman Sachs and the controversy behind its success.   From the outside, Goldman Sachs is a perfect company. The Goldman PR machine loudly declares it to be smarter, more ethical, and more profitable than all of its competitors. Behind closed doors, however, the firm constantly straddles the line between conflict of interest and legitimate deal making, wields significant influence over all levels of government, and upholds a culture of power struggles and toxic paranoia. And its clever bet against the mortgage market in 2007—unknown to its clients—may have made the financial ruin of the Great Recession worse. Money and Power reveals the internal schemes that have guided the bank from its founding through its remarkable windfall during the 2008 financial crisis. Through extensive research and interviews with the inside players, including current CEO Lloyd Blankfein, William Cohan constructs a nuanced, timely portrait of Goldman Sachs, the company that was too big—and too ruthless—to fail. “[The] definitive account of the most profitable and influential investment bank of the modern era.” — The New York Times Book Review “The best analysis yet of Goldman’s increasingly tangled web of conflicts. . . . The writing is crisp and the research meticulous.” — The Economist “[A] revelatory account of the rise and rise of Goldman Sachs. . . . A vast trove of material.” — Financial Times   “Well done and absorbing. Cohan’s grasp of the . . . recent inside politics of the firm is sure and convincing.” — The Washington Post “The frankest, most detailed, most human assessment of the bank to date. Cohan portrays a firm that has grown so large and hungry that it's no longer long-term greedy but short-term vicious. And that’s the wonder—and horror—of Goldman Sachs.” — BusinessWeek “Brings the bank’s sometimes ‘schizophrenic’ behavior to vivid life. . . . Cohan evinces an eye for telling images and an ear for deadpan quotations. . . . [and] puts his skepticism to good use.” — Bloomberg News   “[Cohan is] one of our most able financial journalists.” — Los Angeles Times   “A former Wall Street man and a talented writer, [Cohan] has the rare gift not only of understanding the fiendishly complicated goings-on, but also of being able to explain them in terms the lay reader can grasp.” — The Observer (London)   “Cohan writes with an insider’s knowledge of the workings of Wall Street, a reporter’s investigative instincts and a natural storyteller’s narrative command.” — The New York Times William D. Cohan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers House of Cards and The Last Tycoons , which won the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair , has a weekly opinion column in Bloomberg View , and writes frequently for Fortune, The Atlantic , Art News, BloombergBusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Irish Times and The Washington Post , among other publications. He also is a contributing editor on Bloomberg Television and a frequent on-air contributor to MSNBC, CNN and CNBC. A former investment banker, Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Wall Street has always been a dangerous place. Firms have been going in and out of business ever since speculators first gathered under a button­wood tree near the southern tip of Manhattan in the late eighteenth century. Despite the ongoing risks, during great swaths of its mostly charmed 142 years, Goldman Sachs has been both envied and feared for having the best talent, the best clients, and the best political connections, and for its ability to alchemize them into extreme profitability and market prowess. Indeed, of the many ongoing mysteries about Goldman Sachs, one of the most overarching is just how it makes so much money, year in and year out, in good times and in bad, all the while revealing as little as pos­sible to the outside world about how it does it. Another— equally confounding— mystery is the firm’s steadfast, zealous belief in its ability to manage its multitude of internal and external conflicts better than any other beings on the planet. The combination of these two genetic strains— the ability to make boatloads of money at will and to appear to manage conflicts that have humbled, then humiliated lesser firms— has made Goldman Sachs the envy of its financial- services brethren. But it is also something else altogether: a symbol of immutable global power and unparalleled connections, which Goldman is shame­less in exploiting for its own benefit, with little concern for how its suc­cess affects the rest of us. The firm has been described as everything from “a cunning cat that always lands on its feet” to, now famously, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humani