The subprime market had blown up to smithereens in the late 90’s but was back raging and started to implode in late 2005. All the stocks got crushed. In fact, the stocks got crushed so much—I wrote about a column about this in 2005 and I sort of thought I was late to the party, which is why I moved on to option ARMs. I thought that everybody knew that the subprime market was going to implode. So that was a mistake on my part, obviously.

There’s no question that the press was way, way too lax all throughout 2007 and the early part of 2008. We should have been tackling those Bear Stearns hedge funds, for instance, much more aggressively.

TA: It seems the press didn’t want to call “fire” in a crowded theater, even though the theater was clearly on fire.

JE: I agree with that completely. The press needed to be much more aggressive when this was going on. To figure out what the hell Bernanke and Paulson were doing late last year. They were completely fiddling while Rome was burning.

TA: Outside of Portfolio, who do you read? Who’s doing the best journalism?

JE: I’m reading Jon Weil, I think he’s great. I’m reading tons of blogs. I think Krugman was on top of this from early on. And I think Steve Labaton’s byline is something I gravitate to in the Times. Carrick Mollenkamp has been a great reporter at the Journal. I hate to have these lists because I always drop people who are really great. I think Bloomberg has done an excellent job.

TA: What blogs do you read?

JE: The best financial blogs out there are experts and they’re explaining a lot of things. There’s some traders that explain the workings of financial markets in ways that journalists don’t and then there are economists that explain the economy and there are professionals like Calculated Risk. Those guys were professionals in the mortgage market.

Felix Salmon, our blogger at Portfolio, I think he’s great. I don’t always agree with him, but I think he’s incredibly smart and thoughtful and provocative about the financial world.

This new blogger from Australia, John Hempton at Bronte Capital, is really good. I’m just amazed at the plethora of blogs and you even see a lot of news breaking at blogs, too, like Dealbreaker and Clusterstock are getting all these documents and hedge-fund letters. That stuff I pour through. I think the blogosphere has really emerged just in the time i’ve been at Portfolio.

TA: What should the financial press be doing that it’s not doing? What should the heavy guns be focused on next? Not to give away your story ideas, but in broad strokes.

JE: Well, we’re going through the biggest bailout in American history, and I think that we don’t understand why yet. And there are some very big questions we don’t understand about why this is being implemented in such an inconsistent way.

Why did we save Bear and not Lehman? Why did we rejigger the terms of the AIG bailout to make them more lenient? Why did we just bail out Citigroup? Why are we buying preferred stock instead of common stock? Why are we in some cases protecting bondholders, and in the case of Lehman, why did we not protect bondholders? What’s exactly going on with Fannie and Freddie? If the government has nationalized them why are we buying their securities from them?

I just don’t think we have any sense of what the operating idea of the financial bailout is, how it came to be, and why it’s so incompetently applied. And if there is this wide consensus that we did need some kind of bailout, then is this incompetent bailout better than nothing? I think those are difficult questions to answer. We should really, really be looking at Paulson’s and Bernanke’s and Geithner’s records over the last year and a half or even longer to figure out why this has been so poorly implemented and what they’re thinking.

And then the next big story is going to be the fight to keep the financial system the same or to change it. We should all be focused on that. There’s gonna be a lot of palms greased and a lot of loopholes and there’s gonna be a lot of defeats and victories.

Is the Obama administration going to remake the financial regulatory architecture so that this can’t happen again? And then the follow-on question is what the next war is going to be. Are people going to slip the knot on regulation in some way and get it around it? I’m skeptical about this, but are we going to over-regulate in some way that stifles the market?

I think we should have a nice little round of over-regulation, and if we go too far in that direction I’m fine with it for now.