Mark Pittman has been all over this financial crisis.

He was part of a team at Bloomberg News that won the Loeb Award last year for a five-part series on the origins of the crisis called “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” including Pittman’s lead story on how the Street goosed the subprime mortgage market late with financial engineering.

The new standardized contracts they created would allow firms to protect themselves from the risks of subprime mortgages, enable speculators to bet against the U.S. housing market, and help meet demand from institutional investors for the high yields of loans to homeowners with poor credit.

The tools also magnified losses so much that a small number of defaulting subprime borrowers could devastate securities held by banks and pension funds globally, freeze corporate lending, and bring the world’s credit markets to a standstill.

In addition to the Loeb-winning work, Pittman has broken major stories on Goldman Sachs’s interest in the AIG bailout, Hank Paulson’s role in creating the subprime mess, and the ratings agencies inexplicable delays in downgrading mortgage securities, and he’s delved into how Wall Street spread its detritus across the world.

Pittman is a native of Kansas City, graduated from the University of Kansas, and got his first job covering cops at the Coffeyville Journal in southern Kansas, where he was paid so little he had to get a part-time job as a ranch hand across the Oklahoma border in Lenapah. Proving yet again that it really is a small world and journalism is even smaller (and getting smaller every day, as Pittman points out) we discovered to our amazement that my late grandfather Arva Chittum was a good source of Pittman’s back in the early 1980’s in Coffeyville.

He spent twelve years at the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York, before joining Bloomberg News in 1997.

We spoke recently about cops, CDO’s, and the crisis.

The Audit: How did you get started at Bloomberg News?

Mark Pittman: That was back when Bloomberg News only had like fifty people in New York. I covered oil in the beginning and then they moved me to covering securities firms. I was covering the Street in 1999 to 2000. There were only two of us covering the whole Street. We didn’t do a very good job as you can imagine. We could barely get the earnings out.

I went on to private equity and corporate finance. I got a wide education. I learned a lot about trading. If you cover the oil markets, those guys know how to trade. They know how to pull the trigger on stuff and back out. That gets in your bones. When you realize how you make money doing that kind of stuff, a lot of other things make sense. I’m not sure that a lot of business journalists get that kind of knowledge.

That’s stuff you just don’t get covering companies or doing profiles. You learn different stuff.

TA: How’d you get onto the crisis story?

MP: I had a conversation with a couple of people in late 2006/early 2007, and people were talking about what’s wrong with asset-backed securities and where all this is headed. I’d also covered derivatives contracts. When they first started doing credit-default swaps on companies, I covered that. That was like ‘99-2000. You could tell it was going to be a really hot thing.

When they started talking about doing derivatives on mortgage-backed securities [a bet against the housing market; this is explained a few lines below], I was like “oh, man, that means the banks are scared!” That was 2006, and we wrote a whole series about this.

You always want to be around the hot story. If you’re not around the hot story, you’re screwed.

TA: So did you go into that pretty much full-time? How’d you convince your editors to let you do that?

MP: You know it really wasn’t hard. They’ve really let me take a lot of chances here, and they’re extremely generous with my time. They recognize it as an important part of the reporting process. They give me a lot of rope. They let me figure stuff out. That’s something that’s in real short supply with a lot of news organizations now. You’ve got to let reporters run and figure out what’s going on.

TA: Not many others have the resources to do much of that nowadays.

MP: Instead of doing the sixth sidebar on a bailout program that probably won’t work anyway, let the person figure out what’s actually happening. And you’ve got to let your people do that.

We did a five-part series [the one that won the Loeb] on the whole idea of why the subprime crisis occurred, and it starts with this story about how a bunch of traders at Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan got together and said “We need a standard contract to be able to short the mortgage market.” As soon as I realized they were going to try and short the mortgage market I said, “Ohhh. That means they think the market is going down.”

TA: And these are the guys who’ve come out pretty okay in this.

MP: You’ll notice UBS and Merrill aren’t in the group. The thing about this entire series of events is this is so complicated and so intertwined that we don’t have —journalists are not qualified to cover the story. We don’t have the background. These guys are doing stuff that you had no idea was happening. The off-balance-sheet accounting stuff is crazy.

TA: Well, if the ex-chairman of the Fed Alan Greenspan, formerly regarded as a near god, didn’t understand what this stuff was, who did? He had access to all the people and all the information he could want.