Rodgin Cohen on Decade's endOne of our last videos of our Decade of the Deal series pays a visit to Rodgin Cohen, the bank lawyer and Sullivan & Cromwell 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 thirty years. But 2007 and 2008 provided the kind of challenges that even Cohen, who also had 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, Lehman Brothers, AIG and Wachovia, not to say the likes of Morgan Stanley and Goldman, Sachs & Co.
It was quite a stretch. In Sorkin's book, people are always saying: Somebody call Cohen. In this clip, Cohen discusses some of the ...