Bethany McLean | |
|---|---|
 McLean in 2018 | |
| Born | December 12, 1970 Hibbing, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Williams College |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Notable work |
|
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2 |
Bethany Lee McLean (born December 12, 1970) is an American journalist and contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine. She is known for her writing on the Enron scandal and the 2008 financial crisis. Previous assignments include editor-at-large, columnist for Fortune, and a contributor to Slate .
McLean was born in Hibbing, Minnesota on December 12, 1970. McLean graduated from Hibbing High School in 1988. [1] In 1992 she received a B.A. in English and mathematics from Williams College.
McLean started her career as an investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs [2] and joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in 2008. [ citation needed ] She began as a contributor to Slate's Moneybox column[ citation needed ], in 2010[ citation needed ] and "The Bulldog" column in Fortune. [3]
She authored an article on Enron for the March 5, 2001, issue of Fortune entitled, "Is Enron Overpriced?" [4] The article noted some irregularities in Enron's financial documents that were available to the public, suggesting the company's then-record high stock price was unjustified but she did not at that point suspect fraud at Enron. After Enron's rapid collapse later in 2001, McLean co-authored, with Peter Elkind, the book The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003) which detailed the corrupt business practices of Enron officials. The book was later made into the Academy Award-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room . [5]
In 2005, McLean got into a spat with then-CEO of Overstock.com Patrick M. Byrne after she wrote a negative article about Overstock and him. [6]
She co-authored with Joe Nocera a book on the 2008 financial crisis titled All the Devils Are Here .
In September 2015, she published Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants which examines the governance and financial situation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seven years after the 2008 financial crisis. [7] [8] The Washington Post selected it as one of the best nonfiction books of 2015. [9]
In September 2018, she published Saudi America: The Truth about Fracking and How It's Changing the World which examined the "fracking revolution" and U.S. energy independence. [10] [11] In 2019, Mclean launched a podcast titled Making a Killing on Luminary. [12] She also joined the Capitalisn't podcast as a co-host in season 2, along with Chicago Booth Professor Luigi Zingales.
McLean married Chris Wilford in 2000 and divorced in 2006. In May 2008, she married attorney Sean Berkowitz, the former Director of the United States Department of Justice Enron Task Force. [13] [14] [15] They divorced in 2020. [16] McLean resides in Chicago with her children. [17]
Enron Corporation was an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985 as a merger between Lay's Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies. Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron employed approximately 20,600 staff and was a major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper company, with claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000. Fortune named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years.
Andrew Stuart Fastow is an American convicted felon and former financier who was the chief financial officer of Enron Corporation, an energy trading company based in Houston, Texas, until he was fired shortly before the company declared bankruptcy. Fastow was one of the key figures behind the complex web of off-balance-sheet special purpose entities used to conceal Enron's massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets. By unlawfully maintaining personal stakes in these ostensibly independent ghost-entities, he was able to defraud Enron out of tens of millions of dollars.
Chewco Investments L. P. was a limited partnership associated with the Enron scandal, which resulted in the bankruptcy of Enron. It was named after the Star Wars character Chewbacca, because it was created to hide losses from the Joint Energy Development Investment Limited, known by its acronym "JEDI". Like Chewbacca, the Jedi Knights were prominent characters in Star Wars.
John Clifford "Cliff" Baxter was an Enron Corporation executive who resigned in May 2001 before committing suicide the following year. Prior to his death he had agreed to testify before Congress in the Enron scandal.
Mark-to-market or fair value accounting is accounting for the "fair value" of an asset or liability based on the current market price, or the price for similar assets and liabilities, or based on another objectively assessed "fair" value. Fair value accounting has been a part of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in the United States since the early 1990s. Failure to use it is viewed as the cause of the Orange County Bankruptcy, even though its use is considered to be one of the reasons for the Enron scandal and the eventual bankruptcy of the company, as well as the closure of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen.
Jeffrey Keith Skilling is an American businessman who in 2006 was convicted of federal felony charges relating the Enron scandal. Skilling, who was CEO of Enron during the company's collapse, was eventually sentenced to 24 years in prison, of which he served 12 after multiple appeals.
A collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is a type of structured asset-backed security (ABS). Originally developed as instruments for the corporate debt markets, after 2002 CDOs became vehicles for refinancing mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Like other private label securities backed by assets, a CDO can be thought of as a promise to pay investors in a prescribed sequence, based on the cash flow the CDO collects from the pool of bonds or other assets it owns. Distinctively, CDO credit risk is typically assessed based on a probability of default (PD) derived from ratings on those bonds or assets.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a 2005 American documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are credited as writers of the film alongside the director, Alex Gibney. It examines the 2001 collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives during the ensuing Enron scandal, and contains a section about the involvement of Enron traders in the 2000-01 California electricity crisis. Archival footage is used alongside new interviews with McLean and Elkind, several former Enron executives and employees, stock analysts, reporters, and former Governor of California Gray Davis.
Sean M. Berkowitz is a former director of the Department of Justice's Enron Task Force. He prosecuted former employees of Enron who were accused of white collar crimes, principally accounting fraud. Most significantly, he was the lead prosecutor in the joint trial of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. In 2006, shortly after securing guilty verdicts against both, Berkowitz left the Department of Justice to become a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP in Chicago.
Lou Lung Pai is a Chinese-American businessman and former Enron executive. He was CEO of Enron subsidiaries Enron Energy Services and Enron Xcelerator, a venture capital division. He left Enron with over $250 million. Pai was the second-largest land owner in Colorado after he purchased the 77,500-acre (314 km2) Taylor Ranch for $23 million in 1999, though he sold the property in June 2004 for $60 million.
Rebecca P. Mark-Jusbasche, known during her international business career as Rebecca Mark, is the former head of Enron International, a subsidiary of Enron. She was also CEO of Azurix Corp., a publicly traded water services company originally developed by Enron International. Mark was promoted to Vice Chairman of Enron in 1998 and was a member of its board of directors. She resigned from Enron in August 2000.
Joseph Nocera is an American business journalist, and author. He has written for The New York Times since April 2005, writing for the Op-Ed page from 2011 to 2015. He was also an opinion columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
Earnest Stanley O'Neal is an American business executive who was formerly chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch having served in numerous senior management positions at the company prior to this appointment. O'Neal was criticized for his performance during his tenure as chief executive at Merrill Lynch, where he oversaw the deterioration of the firm's stability and capital position, which resulted in his ouster in September 2007, and the firm's eventual fire sale to Bank of America one year later. Prior to his tenure as chairman and CEO, Merrill Lynch had thrived as a stand-alone company since 1914.
The Enron scandal was an accounting scandal involving Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas. When news of widespread fraud within the company became public in October 2001, the company declared bankruptcy and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen – then one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world – was effectively dissolved. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in U.S. history at that time, Enron was cited as the biggest audit failure.
Residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) are a type of mortgage-backed security backed by residential real estate mortgages.
Credit rating agencies (CRAs)—firms which rate debt instruments/securities according to the debtor's ability to pay lenders back—played a significant role at various stages in the American subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 that led to the great recession of 2008–2009. The new, complex securities of "structured finance" used to finance subprime mortgages could not have been sold without ratings by the "Big Three" rating agencies—Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings. A large section of the debt securities market—many money markets and pension funds—were restricted in their bylaws to holding only the safest securities—i.e. securities the rating agencies designated "triple-A". The pools of debt the agencies gave their highest ratings to included over three trillion dollars of loans to homebuyers with bad credit and undocumented incomes through 2007. Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of these triple-A securities were downgraded to "junk" status by 2010, and the writedowns and losses came to over half a trillion dollars. This led "to the collapse or disappearance" in 2008–09 of three major investment banks, and the federal government's buying of $700 billion of bad debt from distressed financial institutions.
Dabhol Power Station is located near Anjanwel village in Ratnagiri district in Maharashtra, India, about 160 kilometres (99 mi) south of Mumbai. The power station was built by the Dabhol Power Company (DPC), which was a joint venture of Enron International, General Electric, Bechtel and Maharashtra Power Development Corporation. At the start of its construction in 1992, the Dabhol power station project was, at $3 billion, the biggest foreign investment in India. The plant was mired in controversies of corruption and malpractices involving Enron and people at the highest political levels of the Indian and the United States governments.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron is a book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, first published in 2003 by Portfolio Trade. In 2005, it was adapted into a documentary film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis is a nonfiction book by authors Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera about the 2008 financial crisis. It details how the financial crisis bubbled up from a volatile, and bipartisan, mixture of government meddling and laissez-faire. It concludes that the episode was not an accident, and that banks understood the big picture before the crisis happened but continued with bad practices nevertheless.
The Big Three credit rating agencies are S&P Global Ratings (S&P), Moody's, and Fitch Group. S&P and Moody's are based in the US, while Fitch is dual-headquartered in New York City and London, and is controlled by Hearst. As of 2013 they hold a collective global market share of "roughly 95 percent" with Moody's and Standard & Poor's having approximately 40% each, and Fitch around 15%.
So they are part of the mysterious machinery that is an important component of most Americans lives, but you actually never think about it until things go wrong.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 C-SPAN Q&A interview with McLean, June 19, 2005 | |
| C-SPAN Q&A interview with McLean on All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, November 14, 2010 |
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
