Edgar Heinemann
The SEC chairman who saw it coming, and kept Barrett Johnson when everyone else wanted him gone.
Edgar Heinemann is six foot three and has never once softened a sentence to make a room comfortable. As chairman of the SEC he keeps a hand on the market’s on-off switch, and he was the one who read a strange pattern of trades and understood, long before anyone above him would listen, that something terrible was on its way. When Barrett’s bosses demanded he be fired for making noise, Heinemann kept the man who turned out to be right. Blunt, sleep-deprived, and grimly funny, he is the rare Washington power broker who says the true thing first and apologizes for none of it.
“Airlines plus insurance companies equals something bad coming our way.”
— From The Hangman