Steve Rattner, the journalist turned banker turned Car Czar, steered his way to the pinnacle of the New York–Washington elite, the most effectively ambitious player of his generation. Then, just as he reached the top, he lost control.

McKinsey & Co. are supposed to know it all.

Inside Goldman Sachs, America’s most successful, cynical, envied, despised, and (in its view, anyway) misunderstood engine of capitalism.

Guilty of a shocking crime against his own brother-in-law, real-estate mogul Charles Kushner has been cast out of power. So his son Jared, the 28-year-old Observer owner, has to carry the ambition for the both of them.

Why does Bernie’s better half inspire such vitriol?

Katherine Farley, just named chairwoman of Lincoln Center, is the wife of Jerry Speyer, chairman of MoMA. How much philanthropy can one couple handle— even with a net worth of $1.5 billion?

More than Obama, more than Geithner, more than anyone, it is the once-maligned Federal Reserve chairman who has saved us from the second Great Depression.

Amar Bhide is a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of The Venturesome Economy.

Stephanie Pomboy is an economic forecaster who took her own medicine.

James Grant, who publishes the excellent newsletter Grant's Interest Rate Observer, is one reason to believe Wall Street has a brain.