Audit Notes: Underemployment, Rogue Industry, Schedule A
The St. Petersburg Times's has an excellent profile of an MBA who's gone from a six-figure job to bagging groceries in three years. It's a snapshot of the downwardly mobile in post-crash America: The national unemployment rate is 10 percent, t...
Bloomberg’s Overdraft Story Doesn’t Have the Goods
Bloomberg has its heart in the right place with a story on banks seeking new prey, err, revenue streams to replace overdrafts (although, as the Times showed this morning, they're doing all they can to con consumers into keeping the overdraft b...
NYT Shows Banks Playing Dirty on Overdrafts
The New York Times is excellent to spotlight how banks are using aggressive marketing tactics to try to trick customers into opting in to overdraft "protection" now that federal law forces banks to make consumers choose to let banks dock them ...
Audit Notes: Goldman-Greece, Planet Money, Leverage Limits
The Wall Street Journal flooded the zone on the Goldman-Greece debt scandal with a troika of stories today. On page one, it has a nice overview of the story and broadens it by pointing out that other European countries, including Portugal, did...
The WSJ Is Hit and Miss on Geithner
The Wall Street Journal has some interesting reporting this morning on Tim Geithner—reporting that doesn't do him any good. But the paper fumbles the execution of the story here with a dumb headline and a top that focuses too much on Was...
Audit Notes: Uh Oh, Joe Cassano; Asian Markets; BW Hires
Reuters reports that AIG may have misled investors on material information related to its exposure to subprime mortgages. Investigative reporter Matthew Goldstein has waded through Schedule A and determined that some 30 percent of the CDO's in...
Mortgage Securitization in the Roaring Twenties
Floyd Norris has a fascinating column today on new research that shows, yet again, that there's nothing new under the sun—even on Wall Street. And I thought mortgage securitization was something invented by Lewis Ranieri in the '80s. Nor...
Bloomberg’s Reilly Wrecks the Lex on Fed/AIG
Bloomberg's David Reilly has a terrific column up today on the New York Federal Reserve and what's wrong with its secrecy on the AIG bailout (and on everything else, for that matter). Reilly kicks things off with a half-joke : The idea of secr...
Audit Notes: Lex Dreck, Recourse, Extend and Pretend
This is a bad sentiment for a journalist to have: Postmortems are revealing. But too much poking is damaging. That's the Financial Times's Lex column this morning telling the media and Congress to back off on the AIG backdoor bailout. Yeah, th...
Goldman, Gawker, and the Journal
Here's a good example of reporting by old media getting amplified and expanded upon by new media. The Wall Street Journal has a good page-one story today on how banks are finagling the compensation issue by providing other perks to bankers. Ba...
Newsday Paywall Is Barely Affecting Local Traffic
The news that Newsday has signed up just thirty-five online subscribers since it put its Web site behind a paywall caused a little splash the other day. We said don't make too much of it since the paper has one-of-a-kind circumstances and didn...
Bloomberg’s One-Source Stories
One of the essentials of writing a news story is to talk to more than one source. That's so basic it's kind of an embarrassing lede. But tell that to Bloomberg. It has a habit of writing up what people say on its TV network and slapping...
