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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged financial times

1. November 21, 2011 03:09 PM

   FT Style Undermines A Good Investigation

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Financial Times has a good investigation today into how hedge funds are stocking their boards with directors in the Cayman Islands who serve on hundreds of boards. The FT did a lot of work here, analyzing thousands of SEC filings to come up with its numbers, which show hedge funds are using something like robosigners: Call them robo-directors. Like...

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2. June 15, 2011 12:42 PM

   FT: SEC Investigates a Magnetar Deal

   By Ryan Chittum

   The FT's Kara Scannell scoops that the SEC is investigating a Magnetar CDO deal, probing Merrill Lynch and its handpicked CDO manager Corey Ribotsky, though Magnetar itself apparently isn't being scrutinized. The SEC, which is looking at several deals banks structured for Magnetar, is investigating whether Merrill told buyers that Magnetar helped select the assets included in the Norma CDO...

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3. June 13, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: bad banks edition

   Too big to behave or to fail

   By Ryan Chittum

   Gretchen Morgenson writes about how the interest-rate swaps Wall Street encouraged government agencies to take out are costing governments billions of dollars a year: These swaps were supposed to save the public some money. And, for a while, they did. Then the financial crisis hit — and rates went south and stayed there. Now issuers are paying bond holders above-market...

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4. September 15, 2011 07:36 PM

   Audit Notes: Bloomberg’s Euphemisms, ETFs and CDOs, TechCrunch and Goldman

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's sort of darkly amusing to read all the euphemisms in this Bloomberg News story reporting on the latest warnings signs of a possible collapse of the European financial system. It points out "deposit flight," an "erosion," an "outflow of money," "reduced deposits," an "outflow of deposits," and says that money-market funds have "cut investments in Spanish and Italian lenders...

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5. March 2, 2011 07:47 PM

   Audit Notes: Criminal Query, Ritholtz on McKinsey; Obama’s Jobs Panel

   By Ryan Chittum

   — The Financial Times reports that the SEC is investigating whether Las Vegas Sands bribed foreign officials. The headline: Sands China shares hit by SEC probe of parent But down in the fifth paragraph we learn that the Justice Department is also investigating Las Vegas Sands. The DOJ prosecutes criminal cases, while the SEC prosecutes (or more like: settles) civil...

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6. November 15, 2011 07:24 PM

   Audit Notes: Farmland Booms, Regulation and Jobs, Euro Sell-off

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal reports that farming is making something of a comeback on the edges of metro areas amid collapsing residential land values. This anecote is great: Consider the England family, which recently repurchased 430 acres of cotton fields in Eloy, Ariz. In 2004, the Englands had paid $731,000 for the parcel about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix. The...

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7. March 4, 2011 06:33 PM

   Audit Notes: Fox on the Overpaid, Winkler Smiles, FT Ads

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Fox News propaganda machine has been ramped up to portray $700 a week teachers and other government employees as overpaid, violent, journalist-hating wastrels milking the public dry while letting the Chinese beat our progeny at math. Leave it to Jon Stewart to point out how this contrasts with how some of the same mouthpieces Fox News treated the multimillionaires...

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8. November 7, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: FT denies Bloomberg report, Drudge stats, financialization

   Misleading with bogus statistics

   By Ryan Chittum

   Bloomberg News reports that Pearson is considering putting the Financial Times up for sale, as Michael Wolff predicted a month ago. Pearson Plc is planning to explore a sale of the Financial Times newspaper as the company focuses on its faster-growing education business, people with knowledge of the situation said. The company has decided to consider offers for the newspaper...

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9. November 28, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: FT’s Fairhead is out; BofA CEO stonewalls; Rent a Quote

   But Pearson says the paper is not for sale.

   By Ryan Chittum

   FT Group CEO Rona Fairhead got denied the top job at Pearson and so is stepping down as chairman and CEO of its unit the FT Group, with a $1.8 million exit package. The Guardian's Nils Pratley asks a good question: "Why is Pearson paying Rona Fairhead to go?" The New York Times reports that the new Pearson CEO visited...

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10. January 18, 2012 09:24 PM

    Audit Notes: Gapper on SOPA, Japan’s Papers, Credit Card Antitrust

    By Ryan Chittum

    The reaction from internet evangelists over the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act has bordered on hysteria. Witness Wikipedia shutting down for twenty-four hours so we can all "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge." The Financial Times's John Gapper takes a level-headed look at all this and finds it overdone and, notably, self-serving: ... Silicon Valley damages...

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11. July 3, 2012 08:04 PM

    Audit Notes: Glass-Steagall II, beyond paywalls, warehouse work

    The FT comes out in favor of hiving off investment banks

    By Ryan Chittum

    This is important: The Financial Times editorial page comes out in favor of a Glass-Steagall II that would once again separate investment banking from commercial/retail banking: The clash between retail and investment banking has always been evident. What is now clear, however, is that the hard-charging, revenue-seeking investment banking culture predominates when they are pushed together. The more herbivorous retail...

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12. August 10, 2012 09:28 PM

    Audit Notes: Google moves on copyright, The Daily Shoe, Olympics

    As its business interest aligns with content producers

    By Ryan Chittum

    Google will finally begin to penalize pirate sites in its search algorithm. What took so long? The Wall Street Journal is very good to put this context up high: The move comes as Google itself is attempting to become a major seller and distributor of professional video and music content through a variety of services, from its YouTube video site...

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13. April 15, 2011 12:54 AM

    Audit Notes: HuffPo Shines, Libor Lineup, An FT Slip

    By Ryan Chittum

    I don't know about you, but the best news story I read today on the Levin-Coburn Report wasn't in the Journal or the Times, Bloomberg or Reuters. It was by William Alden and Shahien Nasiripour in The Huffington Post. It's a clear presentation of the report's findings on Goldman Sachs, led by the fact that Senator Levin wants to refer...

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14. December 19, 2011 11:43 PM

    Audit Notes: Inflation Inflation, FT on Frannie, Deep Downturns

    By Ryan Chittum

    Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong catch Niall Ferguson in a whopper on inflation. Ferguson: And the reason the CPI is losing credibility is that, as economist John Williams tirelessly points out, it’s a bogus index. The way inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been “improved” 24 times since 1978. If the old methods were still used,...

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15. October 3, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: Insert hospice joke here, Web pagination, too big to value

    The Washington Post diversifies its business into end-of-life care

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Washington Post is getting into the hospice business, which prompted a few too many obvious jokes about death and newspapers. But lots of people are understandably wondering what the Post is thinking. After the hospice surprise wears off, it seems like it could be a positive move, and the company has a track record of outside investments paying off....

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16. November 17, 2011 07:50 PM

    Audit Notes: Net Exposure, Crain’s Chicago Probe, Angelo’s Tumblr

    By Ryan Chittum

    Gillian Tett of the Financial Times shows why banks hedging their European exposure with credit-default swaps aren't necessarily actually hedged. She notes that Deutsche Bank says it reduced its net exposure to Italian sovereign debt by 88 percent in part by buying CDS, but that: These days, it is becoming less clear whether those sovereign CDS contracts really offer effective...

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17. June 27, 2012 08:06 PM

    Audit Notes: News Corp. split edition

    More on the implications of Murdoch's move

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Financial Times's John Gapper has the best take on what Rupert Murdoch's bustup of News Corporation means: Some US investors believe that the BSkyB deal could be put back on the table under the new structure. That is not plausible. Splitting assets into two companies, both controlled by the Murdoch family, will make no difference, at least until Britain’s...

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18. October 7, 2011 08:06 PM

    Audit Notes: Overdraft Ethics, CNN’s Wall Street Apologist, U.S. Gas Boom

    By Ryan Chittum

    American Banker's Jeff Horwitz finds some emails that offer an interesting look into how banks make unethical decisions to gouge their customers. These are from Union Bank, which like lots of banks, artificially reordered checking account transactions to make bigger transactions clear first. That makes it more likely that the customer will rack up multiple overdrafts. There was pushback amongst...

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19. August 4, 2011 08:03 PM

    Audit Notes: Panic in the Markets

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 512 points today, some 4.3 percent, as panic takes hold in global markets. The 10-year Treasury bond's yield tumbled to 2.46 percent, signaling the bond vigilantes long warned about by folks like the Wall Street Journal editorial page are being utterly routed. Gillian Tett writes in the Financial Times that the crisis in Europe...

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20. June 8, 2011 07:46 PM

    Audit Notes: Poor Wall Street, Our Lost Decade, Parallel Universe

    By Ryan Chittum

    Reading this Wall Street Journal story, you'd think that Wall Street had fallen on hard times: Morgan Stanley offered a glimpse into Wall Street's future, and the outlook has changed so much from the heady days of the past that the firm is planning to keep a close watch on BlackBerry usage. New cost-cutting moves were the focus of a...

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