Bethany McLean

American journalist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair Magazine, Author, The Big Fail

Speaker

Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a contributor at Business Insider. She’s the co-host, along with University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales, of the podcast Capitalisn’t. Her newest book, which she co-authored with Joe Nocera, is “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Helps and Who it Leaves Behind.”

Previously, she was an editor-at-large at Fortune Magazine. She is the co-author with Peter Elkind of the “Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron.” A documentary based on the book was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006. In 2010, she co-authored “All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis” with Joe Nocera. In 2015, Columbia Global Reports published her mini book “Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the US Mortgage Giants,” and in the fall of 2018, CGR published “Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World.”

McLean graduated from Williams College in 1992 with a double major in math and English, and from 1992 to 1995 she worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs.