Audit Interview: Mark Pittman Feb 2009. (CJR). Looking back.

[chill_wind]

The Audit — February 27, 2009 08:45 AM
Audit Interview: Mark Pittman

“This is a defining moment for business journalism and for Wall Street.”

By Ryan Chittum

(UPDATE, November 29, 2009: Mark died a couple of days ago. It’s a huge loss and we’ll have more on him next week, but until then you can read some of what we’ve written about his exploits here. We wrote about when he and Bloomberg sued the Fed and when he won. Here’s Pittman with his friend and colleague Bob Ivry (who wrote Pittman’s excellent obituary), with a great profile of Elizabeth Warren last week. Here’s our look at how a Pittman story last September helped break the huge story of Goldman’s (and others’) backdoor bailout through AIG.

Here he is going after an incredibly complex story: How much are those toxic assets actually worth? And Pittman kept a close eye on the disastrously bad deals Uncle Sam cut for itself to benefit Wall Street. Watch him leverage the hot story, the AIG bonuses, to show how much bigger another story was, the bailouts of AIG’s counterparties.)


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.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/audit_interview_mark_pittman.php?page=1

The interview is 4 pages. What an incredible loss to his friends and and family, to what very little is left of his kind of journalism, and to us all.