Best-selling business author to speak at UWSP

Metro Wire Staff

A New York Times best-selling author and journalist at Vanity Fair and CNBC will give the inaugural Business and Society Lecture next month, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s School of Business and Economics.

Bethany McLean will present “Why Business Goes Bad: Lessons from 20 years of covering frauds, scams and other disasters” at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 3, in the Dreyfus University Center Theatre. McLean is credited with exposing the Enron scandal and has covered stories about Valeant, Wells Fargo, Fannie Mae and the energy revolution.

This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited. To guarantee a seat, register at uwsp.edu/business.

The Business and Society Lecture is part of the Smiley Professional Events series in which students attend a variety of career-related presentations and workshops throughout the school year.

McLean was previously 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 published by Columbia Global Reports about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the financial underpinnings of the fracking boom.

McLean hosts of the “Making a Killing” podcast. 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 op-ed page.

She worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs before joining Fortune.