The hidden history of Wall Street and the White House comes down to a single, powerful, quintessentially American concept: confidence. Both centers of power, tapping brazen innovations over the past three decades, learned how to manufacture it. Until August 2007, when that confidence finally began t[...]

As an honor student walking the gauntlet of sneers and threats at his crime-infested high school in Washington, D.C., Cedric Jennings achieved the impossible: a 4.02 grade-point average and acceptance into Brown University. Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his stories about Jennings and now [...]