Episode 12: COVID & What It Has Revealed About The U.S. Economy
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“You should invest the time at some point in your life in understanding how our financial system works, and understanding how to look at your own investments and think about them, because you are never going to be able to trust anybody to do this for you.”
About the Interview
Bethany McLean worked on Wall Street in the early 1990s (where host Jan Brzeski was a colleague) and went on to write a series of gripping stories and books about some of the biggest business & finance stories in the past 30 years, including “The Smartest Guys in the Room” about the Enron scandal. In this interview, Bethany discusses her upcoming book about COVID, and what it has revealed about the state of the U.S. economy. Astute listeners will find her insights very relevant to investing!
Bethany McLean
Journalist & Best Selling Author
Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Previously, she was an editor-at-large at Fortune Magazine. She is the co-author of the 2003 book “The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron,” which was the basis for the Academy Award nominated documentary of the same name. In 2010, she co-authored “All the Devils Are Here: the Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.” She has also written two mini-books that were published by Columbia Global Reports: “Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the Mortgage Giants,” which is about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and “Saudi America: The Truth about Fracking and How It’s Changing the World,” which is a skeptical look at the financial underpinnings of the fracking boom.
McLean is also the host of the podcast Making a Killing, which is available through Luminary. Her 2016 Vanity Fair piece on disgraced pharmaceutical company Valeant was used as the basis for Netflix’s “Dirty Money” episode about the drugmaker. She has also contributed to the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the New York Times oped page. 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 before joining Fortune.
