Bethany McLean
- Co-Author of "All the Devils Are Here: the hidden history of the 2008 financial crisis"
- Co-Author: "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron"
- Former Editor-at-Large for FORTUNE
- Former Analyst at Goldman Sachs
Bethany McLean is a business journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She was the editor-at-large for thirteen years at Fortune before joining Vanity Fair in July 2008 and Slate as a columnist in October 2010. In early 2001, McLean was one of the first reporters to raise questions about Enron, with her story “Is Enron Overpriced?” She and fellow Fortune senior writer...
read the restBethany McLean is a business journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She was the editor-at-large for thirteen years at Fortune before joining Vanity Fair in July 2008 and Slate as a columnist in October 2010. In early 2001, McLean was one of the first reporters to raise questions about Enron, with her story “Is Enron Overpriced?” She and fellow Fortune senior writer Peter Elkind exposed Enron, noticing the irregularities in Enron’s financial documents that were available to the public and suggesting the company’s then-record high stock price was unjustified. When Enron collapsed in 2001, she and Elkind drew froma wide range of unique sources and provides a definitive account Enron’s rise from obscurity to the top of the business world to its disastrous demise. This national bestseller The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron went on to become an Oscar-nominated documentary.
McLean also co-wrote All the Devils Are Here, where she and co-author Joe Nocera go back several decades to weave the hidden history of the 2008 financial crisis. They explore the motivations of everyone from famous CEOs, cabinet secretaries, and politicians to anonymous lenders, borrowers, analysts, and Wall Street traders. All the Devils Are Here provides a detailed account of how the financial crisis bubbled up from a volatile, and bipartisan, mixture of government meddling and laissez-faire.
In her upcoming book, The Big Fail (October 2023), McLean partners with Nocera again to take a deep dive into America’s catastrophically enormous failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. In this page-turning exposé, McLean and Nocera explores how American capitalism left us brutally unprepared for a global pandemic.
McLean has also written in-depth pieces about the credit rating agencies, Goldman Sachs, President Clinton’s global philanthropy, Australia’s Macquarie Bank, and more. Before joining Fortune, she spent three years as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. She graduated from Williams College in 1992 with a double major in mathematics and English.
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