Brendan I. Koerner

The Wall Street wizards who brought on catastrophe by pretending to eliminate risk.

A useful corollary to Siskel’s rule as applied to autobiographies of business titans might be: “After reading this book, would I want to have lunch with the author?” The highest compliment I can thus pay Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman is that I’d love to break bread with Yvon […]

But I seem to have derived less benefit from my addiction than many other habitual caffeine ingesters whom Antony Wild describes in Coffee: A Dark History. A British coffee merchant who is credited with introducing specialty brews to his native country, as well as the author of several histories of the East India Company, Wild […]

Casual fans of flim-flam history are already aware that Charles Ponzi, whose surname is now synonymous with “pyramid scheme,” couldn’t dodge the law when his financial house of cards collapsed in 1920. The pint-sized immigrant from Lugo, Italy, born Carlos Pietro Giovanni Gugliemlo Tebaldo Ponzi, never went on the lam, nor did he try to […]

Logging onto America Online, however, one might have surmised that May 16, 2001 was the most frivolous 24-hour stretch in recorded history. On AOL’s welcome screen, the startup window that greets about 70 million different people each month, the headlines contained nary a mention of Arctic drilling or misplaced evidence. In the choicest, eye-level section […]

Sounds like the buddy-buddy relationship between Republicans and the energy industry, right? The characters cited in the above scenario, however, are the Democrats and Hollywood, one of Washington’s coziest couples. For years, Hollywood has poured money into the Democrats’ campaign coffers and been rewarded with indispensable assistance on the industry’s crusade of the moment–squelching new […]