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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Revolving Door

1. May 12, 2011 01:33 PM

   An FCC Commissioner’s Brazen Dash Through the Revolving Door

   Buried by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News show some terrible news judgment today, burying news that FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker is jumping ship to Comcast less than four months after voting to approve the company's controversial purchase of NBC Universal. The Journal stuffs a brief inside the Marketplace section. Bloomberg only bothers to give it 124 words (Update: Bloomberg...

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2. March 15, 2011 02:44 PM

   As the Revolving Door Turns

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal reports today that the head of the Federal Housing Administration, David H. Stevens, will become CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association. Meantime, the Los Angeles Times reports that former Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael "Son of Colin" Powell will become CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Powell at least waited a few years. Stevens...

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3. December 9, 2010 08:19 PM

   Audit Notes: Don’t Buy Our Bonds!, Rail FAIL, Orszag to Citigroup

   By Ryan Chittum

   New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch went off the reservation in a speech today, Bloomberg reports. First, he criticizes state cash cow Wall Street: Wall Street bankers perceive New York’s $9 billion budget deficit as an opportunity to propose financing deals that may worsen the state’s long-term fiscal condition, Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch said. “They are up here peddling the...

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4. December 14, 2010 11:51 PM

   Audit Notes: Fallows on Orszag, The Atlantic in the Black, Google

   By Ryan Chittum

   Obama cabinet official Peter Orszag took a spin through the revolving door and ended up in a million-dollar sinecure at Citigroup, which is still part owned by the government. James Fallows has the best take on that, calling it "damaging and shocking": Shocking, in the structural rather than personal corruption that it illustrates. I believe Orszag (whom I do not...

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5. September 20, 2012 02:25 AM

   Audit Notes: high-frequency trading, Ann Arbor news, SEC access

   A whistleblower sparks a growing investigation, reports the WSJ

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal has a good page-one story and scoop on a high-frequency trader turned whistleblower whose complaint has sparked a big investigation by regulators into whether exchanges are screwing small investors: He became convinced exchanges were providing such an edge after he says he was offered one himself when he ran a high-speed trading firm—a way to place...

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6. January 20, 2012 09:43 PM

   Audit Notes: Justice’s Revolving Door, GE Probed, iBooks Author

   By Ryan Chittum

   Reuters's Scot J. Paltrow reports that Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder and the head of his criminal division worked for a law firm that represented a "Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud" (emphasis mine): The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and...

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7. November 18, 2011 07:56 PM

   Audit Notes: Occupy Maybelline, Abramoff on the Revolving Door, News Corp. (UPDATED)

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Occupy Wall Street movement is already having its dissent commodified. As BagNews shows, this Maybelline commercial shows its models prancing around in co-opted Occupy imagery (UPDATE: Or not. BagNews updates its post to note that the Maybelline commercial predates Occupy by a year, though it asks whether it's been rolled out again for the events): This ad is offensive...

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8. March 22, 2011 08:24 PM

   Audit Notes: The Fed and Labor, Revolving Door Watch, Bank Dividends

   By Ryan Chittum

   Mike Konczal, aka Rortybomb, has a very interesting post asking questions about the impact of Federal Reserve policies have had on wage stagnation. He finds a 2005 paper that examined the Fed's paranoia about wage inflation via two decades of Fed board transcripts: For some people there is no “After the Cold War.” Even though the Cold War had ended,...

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9. June 22, 2012 06:50 AM

   Bloomberg blows the whistle on the IRS

   The agency hamstrings a program designed to bring in tips on tax evasion

   By Ryan Chittum

   Bloomberg News has an eye-opening investigation into what we now know is the failed IRS Whistleblowers Program. That program is supposed to pay people who tip the IRS off to tax fraud 30 percent of any recovery, but Jesse Drucker and Peter S. Green report that just three of 1,300 whistleblowers have been given awards since it was created six...

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10. January 27, 2012 01:13 PM

    Charlie Rose’s Weak Q&A With the SEC’s Khuzami

    By Ryan Chittum

    Audit contributing editor Felix Salmon, writing this morning about Channel 4 reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy's tough questioning of Larry Summers, asked, "Has Summers ever been asked questions like this, on camera, by an American reporter? It seems unlikely. Our interviewers tend to be less Guru-Murthy than Charlie Rose. Rose has a new interview in Bloomberg BusinessWeek with the SEC's head of...

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11. August 4, 2011 01:46 PM

    Excellent Reporting on the Revolving Door By American Banker

    Paper's FOIA request shows a former FHA commish palling around with his future employer

    By Ryan Chittum

    American Banker has a terrific story on the revolving door, digging into the records of former Federal Housing Authority commissioner David Stevens, who left the FHA earlier this year to head the Mortgage Bankers Association. The Banker got hold of Stevens' emails through a Freedom of Information Act request and writes that they show how chummy he was with the...

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12. March 3, 2011 06:56 PM

    The Crystal Ball For Chris Dodd Revisited

    A trip through the revolving door, but not to Wall Street

    By Ryan Chittum

    Newly retired Democratic Senator Chris Dodd has now announced what he'll be doing for a post-Senate career: lobbying for Hollywood. So, I must admit I underestimated Senator Dodd when I wrote this post on "The Crystal Ball For Chris Dodd: Will it be a big bank, a hedge fund, or a lobbying gig?" I and a lot of others guessed...

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13. May 4, 2011 12:28 PM

    The Regulators on the Bus

    A Times story shows the resources gap between regulators and Wall Street

    By Ryan Chittum

    We've wondered often just what it is that makes our financial regulators so toothless in the wake of the widespread fraud and chicanery that helped crash the financial system. This, reported in The New York Times this morning, obviously isn't the main problem, but it sure doesn't help: On a recent trip to New York to tour a trading floor,...

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14. February 23, 2011 02:01 PM

    The SEC, Tangled Up in Madoff

    By Ryan Chittum

    How about that Irving Picard? The lawyer trying to recover cash for Bernie Madoff's victims had the nerve to sue Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase for $6.4 billion, saying the bank was at the "very center" of Madoff's fraud and knew—or should have known—what was going on (it's worth revisiting a New York Times/Il Sole 24 Ore report from early 2009...

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