During the past four decades, the financial world has been utterly transformed. On the following pages, we bring you the activists and iconoclasts, the dreamers and empire builders, the rulemakers and risk-takers who made all the difference.

Robert Rubin

To Earn RespectFirst as the Clinton administration’s national economic adviser, then as Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin was the calming voice and pragmatic pilot of the U.S. economy during an unprecedented period of prosperity at home and unsettling financial panics — from the Mexican peso crisis of 1994 to the Asian flu of 1997 — abroad. A trained lawyer, Rubin rose to prominence as a risk arbitrageur at Goldman Sachs, where he mentored the future founders of several leading hedge funds and where he became co-chairman before moving into government. Rubin, 66, is currently chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup. The man who led Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Treasury discusses...