Bethany McLean
Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
Previously, she was an editor-at-large at Fortune Magazine, where her 2001 piece, “Is Enron Overpriced?” was one of the first skeptical articles about Enron. After Enron collapsed into bankruptcy, she co-authored the “Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron” with her Fortune colleague Peter Elkind. A documentary based on the book was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.
In 2008, McLean joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. In 2010, her book “All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis,” which she co-authored with New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, was published. 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.”
Her 2016 Vanity Fair story on disgraced pharmaceutical company Valeant was used as the basis for Netflix’s “Dirty Money” episode about the drug maker.
She is also a columnist for Yahoo Finance and a contributor to CNBC.
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.
112: Bethany McLean, part 1: the Business and People of Fracking
Bethany made her name as the first to report that Enron was overpriced, which meant going deep into the numbers and people, understanding them, and then facing overwhelming criticism. Turns out she was right, but can you imagine the friction and hostility she must have faced?
Now she’s looking at fracking. We want journalists like her investigating and reporting what’s happening that we don’t know about. Are we increasing our nation’s security?
She looks at the people and numbers, makes sense of them, and wrote a short, colorful, informative book on it.
The short answer is that it doesn’t make sense except for some economic anomalies, but getting into more detail helps you understand the direction of the country. She explains the short-term perspective of oil and gas, though the main point seems that the U.S. has no energy policy. This is our world.
If you want to influence fracking, environment is not the most effective lever. If you want to understand this critical part of the U.S. becoming an exporter again and what may happen next, you’ll appreciate the book.
Listen for the intersection of leadership, economics, and finance.
(I also recommend reading her Vanity Fair cover story on Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez for two engaging profiles and pictures.)
Read the transcript.