Unemployment Rate Misses True Labor Picture, Bloomberg Says

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 6, 2009 at 09:50 AM

Bloomberg has a nice story today on how the unemployment rate is woefully understating the amount of pain in the... More

Bloomberg Looks at What Toxic Assets Might Be Worth

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 3, 2009 at 02:18 PM

We've been asking for a while now for a story that would delve into what seems to me the core... More

NYT’s False Balance on AIG Ex-CEO Greenberg

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 3, 2009 at 11:27 AM

Jay Rosen points me to a story on AIG in The New York Times this morning and asks if a... More

FT: Wall Street Sees a New Shell Game

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 3, 2009 at 09:08 AM

The Financial Times fronts an important story today that shows the ridiculousness of several things, including our banking system and,... More

The WSJ Singles on Sports Subsidies

The Providence Journal goes down looking.

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 2, 2009 at 06:28 PM

The Journal has a pretty good story today on corporate welfare for sports teams. This one's about the Boston Red... More

“Heard” In a Graduate Seminar

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 2, 2009 at 01:10 PM

The Wall Street Journal today tosses off one of the more disappointing pieces I've read in this crisis—and that's saying... More

Mark-to-Market and the Last Honest Man

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 2, 2009 at 08:55 AM

Jonathan Weil over at Bloomberg finds a great way to illustrate the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil policy being instituted by the accounting-standards board... More

“Too Big to Fail”: The Debate

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 1, 2009 at 06:40 PM

Felix Salmon (over at his new digs at Reuters) and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones are having a back-and-forth over... More

Accounting Funny Business

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 1, 2009 at 05:48 PM

A reader emails to point out a good Slate column from the 2002 era of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing,... More

Journal Good on FASB but Should Be Better

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 1, 2009 at 02:15 PM

The Journal is good today in showing how the proposed new rule gutting mark-to-market accounting would be counterproductive to healing... More

Failing on “Too Big to Fail”

By Ryan Chittum   Apr 1, 2009 at 09:06 AM

The Journal, Bloomberg, and Reuters have stories on a Fed president, Gary Stern, saying the government is to blame for... More

Fresno Bee On the Ground with the New Joads

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 31, 2009 at 02:03 PM

The Fresno Bee goes to the "unemployment capital of California" and returns with some stark imagery, scenes that conjure the... More

Boston Globe Is Excellent on Pension Insurer’s Bad Bets

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 31, 2009 at 11:11 AM

Yesterday, The Boston Globe unloosed a superb piece of accountability reporting, writing that the Bush administration decided to move* the... More

BusinessWeek: Unemployment’s Worse Than You Think

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 31, 2009 at 08:48 AM

BusinessWeek runs a nice story looking at the unreliability of unemployment statistics and how they're underestimating actual unemployment—something I criticized... More

Thinning Out the Journal’s Front Page

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 30, 2009 at 11:19 PM

This Wall Street Journal A1 story today takes a rubbery strand of data about consumer borrowing and stretches it past... More

The Journal Games Out Depression Scenarios

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 30, 2009 at 01:52 PM

I like this Wall Street Journal piece today looking at the odds of entering a depression, what that would mean,... More

Bloomberg on Papering Over Banks’ Losses

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 30, 2009 at 09:18 AM

Bloomberg reports that the proposed changes to mark-to-market accounting rules could boost paper profits at banks by 20 percent. Hey,... More

NYT: Heads They Win, Tails They Win a Bit Less

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 27, 2009 at 02:26 PM

The Times looks at a piece of the unaccountability culture in corporate America: Changing stock-option strike prices (legally) to make... More

Just What’s Left in the Metro Dailies?

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 27, 2009 at 01:17 PM

NYU prof and Press Thinker Jay Rosen has had it with what he calls "replaceniks"—those who throw out the red... More

WaPo Scoop Shows Government’s Bailout Conflicts

By Ryan Chittum   Mar 27, 2009 at 11:44 AM

The Washington Post fronts a pretty big scoop on friction at Freddie Mac caused by its untenable straddling between responsibility... More