Michael Mandel of BusinessWeek calculates some rough numbers on journalism employment. Newspaper employment is fast approaching a 50 percent decline since 1990 and tracks manufacturing job losses pretty closely. Periodicals employment has held up much better. Alas, not for BizWeek itself.
The Wall Street Journal has a good page-one story on the fall of Taylor Bean, the big mortgage lender that went bust last month after the feds raided it looking for accounting fraud. “Mr. Farkas’s rise and fall bookends a go-go era of consumer lending, when entrepreneurs built loosely regulated finance companies outside the club of the country’s big banks.”
Gary Weiss raises questions about the coverage of the BusinessWeek sale. “Hell, this isn’t coverage of the Iraqi war. This is the sale of a magazine. Either something is happening or it ain’t.”
Rolfe Winkler of Reuters says Obama’s financial-reform plans don’t cut it. His nifty animated chart shows how the very big have gotten much, much bigger since 2000. His recommendations: Resurrect Glass-Steagall, beef up antitrust enforcement, and “eliminate too-big-to-fail banks.” Can I get an amen?
The Boston Globe looks at Hyman Minsky, the economist who said “capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse” due to periods of stability. A great explainer of his theories, which almost spookily foretold much of the current crisis. (h/t Barry Ritholtz)
Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.