One of our last videos of our Decade of The Deal series pays a visit to Rodgin Cohen, the bank lawyer and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP managing partner who Andrew Ross Sorkin in his new "Too Big to Fail" describes as "one of the most influential and yet least well-known people on Wall Street." Well, Cohen is pretty familiar to us at The Deal, not least for his role in many of the most important banking transactions of the past 30 years. But 2007 and 2008 provided the kind of challenges that even Cohen, who also has a history of crisis management, found unprecedented. Indeed, he proved ubiquitous throughout the tangled sequence of bailouts and bankruptcies last year, from orchestrating various sovereign wealth infusions to advising failing firms such as Bear Stearns Cos., Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM), Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., American International Group Inc. (NYSE:AIG) and Wachovia, not to say the likes of Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) and Goldman, Sachs & Co. (NYSE:GS).
It was quite a stretch. In Sorkin's book, people are always saying: Somebody call Cohen. In this clip, Cohen discusses some of the personal aspects of last year's bailouts and panics: The sense that one crisis continually bled into the next; the tendency of rescue plans to be hatched over weekends; the sheer nervous exhaustion of wrestling with an ever-shifting disaster. Cohen himself dates the crisis to August 2007, when Countrywide Financial Corp., the big subprime mortgage peddler, nearly failed -- Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) injected $2 billion into it, leading to a takeover -- putting the entire system at risk. That systemic risk would become a hammering theme, month by month, weekend by weekend. Let Cohen take you into the heart of the crisis. See the video below or
download it at iTunes. - Robert Teitelman
