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Articles by Ryan Chittum | Email the Author

 

1. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: The Fannie/Freddie Smokescreen

   October 7, 2008 09:16 AM

   Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture continues to smack down the Wall Street apologists trying to shift blame to Fannie and Freddie. Fan and Fred are hardly blameless institutions, but they’re not much more than smokescreens for the... Continue reading

2. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: Mallaby’s Fallacy

   October 6, 2008 09:35 AM

   Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post says all this talk about the crisis being caused by deregulated markets failing is dangerous “nonsense.” He’s right that one of the chief causes was the Fed’s easy money policy, but he's dead... Continue reading

3. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: Times digs into SEC

   October 3, 2008 09:34 AM

   The Times digs into the SEC’s role in enabling the crisis, looking at a crucial regulatory loosening in 2004 that allowed the investment banks to load up on debt (following up on the late New York Sun’s piece... Continue reading

4. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: A Day (and a Half) in the Life

   October 2, 2008 09:15 AM

   The Times puts its big guns on a long page-one piece on the 36 hours when the crisis began spinning out of control. It’s a must read. This is what a credit crisis looks like. It's not like... Continue reading

5. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: $700 Billion in a New Light

   October 1, 2008 09:22 AM

   Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg has an eye-opening column about the need to inject capital into the system, rather than just buy up dud assets, as the bailout plan has proposed. What’s especially enlightening is he presents the $700... Continue reading

6. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: Conveying the Magnitude

   September 30, 2008 09:52 AM

   These are incredible, historic times, and the Times’ writing rises to the occasion much more than the Journal’s, at least in these two stories. Here's the Times on page one today: The stunning defeat of the proposal on... Continue reading

7. The Audit

   Canadian Club

   September 29, 2008 01:13 PM

   When facing a potential conflict of interest, in journalism, as in finance, it’s good to err on the side of disclosure. The Financial Post, the business section of Canada’s National Post and that country’s answer to The Wall... Continue reading

8. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: Goldman Everywhere

   September 29, 2008 09:50 AM

   The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson wrote a great piece yesterday on how a tiny unit of AIG led to the downfall of its entire empire. But perhaps the most interesting part of her reporting was that Lloyd Blankfein,... Continue reading

9. The Audit

   Audit Roundup: NYT on WaMu’s Bank Run

   September 26, 2008 09:10 AM

   The extraordinary times continue. Nobody’s really framing it this way, but a 1930’s-style run on the bank just felled the country’s sixth-largest bank, Washington Mutual. It’s by far the biggest bank failure in American history, and JPMorgan Chase immediately... Continue reading

10. The Audit

    Audit Roundup: Bloomberg Bites the Raters

    September 25, 2008 11:26 AM

    While the focus now is rightly on how to prevent a (possible) economic apocalypse, let’s not forget the key players who got us into this fiasco. Bloomberg keeps the spotlight on the credit-ratings agencies, which were essential in the making... Continue reading

11. The Audit

    5 Crisis Questions for the Press

    September 25, 2008 08:28 AM

    1. What happens if nothing happens? If the government doesn’t bail out Wall Street and the banks, will we all be in bread lines and Hoovervilles, planning our trips west to Californy? Or will we just face a deep recession... Continue reading

12. The Audit

    UAL and Bloomberg, Revisited

    September 23, 2008 03:28 PM

    The litany of media screw-ups in the UAL affair—that financial news blip before the current deluge—was well documented. Except, that is, for one thing: Bloomberg somehow escaped much scrutiny, despite having a key role (for better and... Continue reading

13. The Audit

    Note to CNBC: Breathe

    September 18, 2008 03:41 PM

    And now we have CNBC's Erin Burnett questioning short sellers' patriotism. This, we overhead this afternoon. Not believing our ears, we cleaned them with Q-Tips, Tivo’d the segment, transcribed it, and there it was. "We're getting to the point... Continue reading

14. The Audit

    Audit Roundup: The Sun Breaks One, etc.

    September 18, 2008 02:29 PM

    The New York Sun ain't dead yet, and reports an ex Securities and Exchange Commission official says a boneheaded SEC rule change in 2004 let the investment banks load up on much more debt (twice as much) and is... Continue reading

15. The Audit

    Audit Roundup: Credit Markets Grind to a Halt

    September 17, 2008 06:07 PM

    Forget about AIG. This is the most important story of the day. Banks have essentially stopped lending to each other, threatening to bring the financial system, and thus the economy, to a standstill. This despite the Fed shoveling money... Continue reading

16. The Audit

    Audit Roundup: Wall Street Gives Way

    September 16, 2008 02:12 PM

    Fortune takes a look at how Wall Street rotted from the inside until it gave way, while the FT’s John Gapper gives the history how its model arose. The Journal says the Wall Street business model is... Continue reading

17. The Audit

    Audit Roundup: Playing Chicken

    September 15, 2008 12:07 PM

    Here's a quick guide to what the business press is saying about the deepening crisis on Wall Street: The Journal provides a good behind-the-scenes look at the weekend's momentous events that signaled the return of consequences to the markets:... Continue reading

18. The Audit

    Mae We Correct the Record?

    September 11, 2008 10:03 AM

    The Fannie/Freddie Fiasco is bad enough without news outlets letting politicians mangle their history. In reporting the two parties’ positions on the GSE’s future, the Journal, for instance, lets a misstatement stand: The future of Fannie and Freddie's social... Continue reading

19. The Audit

    Tomato, “Toe-mahto,” TIAA-CREF

    September 8, 2008 03:42 PM

    Malcolm Berko is a money man for Middle America. Writing on an old IBM Selectric typewriter, Berko cranks out a syndicated financial-advice column called “Taking Stock” that runs mostly in small papers across the country, answering letters from perplexed readers... Continue reading

20. The Audit

    Bhopal Revisited

    August 26, 2008 08:30 AM

    Last month, we criticized The New York Times for leaving a big hole in a page-one story on the aftermath of Bhopal—the worst industrial disaster in history—by skimming over the issue of whether Dow Chemical ought to be... Continue reading

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