In April 2011, he and a colleague won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He was the lead reporter on the “Secret IRS Files” series that exposed the tax avoidance strategies of the ultrawealthy. The series won several prizes, including the Selden Ring in 2022. He also won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary.
He was the editor on the “Friends of the Court” series, which revealed how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel; it won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2024.
He serves on the advisory board of the University of California, Berkeley’s Financial Fraud Institute. And he was a consultant on season 3 of the HBO series “Succession.”
His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, NewYorker.com, The Washington Post, The Baffler and The American Prospect and on NPR and “This American Life.” Before joining ProPublica, he was the Wall Street editor of Conde Nast Portfolio and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering markets and finance.
He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the journalist Sarah Ellison, and their daughters.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged an asset manager with fraud for its role in one of the most notorious groups of mortgage securities deals behind the financial crisis.
The Securities and Exchange Commission won praise for its supposedly tough London Whale settlement with JPMorgan. But the big winners so far are the bank execs.
Wall Street may think that Green Mountain has put its troubles behind it. But on its first-ever investor day, questions about the company’s numbers persist.
The recent vote to keep Jamie Dimon as CEO and chairman of JPMorgan shows why the corporate governance movement won't work when it comes to Big Banking.
John Breit was a physicist who went to Wall Street and learned to throw out his math models. He managed risk for Merrill Lynch by developing sources of human intelligence on the trading desks and among the executives.
The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law gave shareholders a vote on executive pay. It turns out that they usually approve compensation packages by margins Fidel Castro would have envied.
A devastating Senate report on JPMorgan’s London Whale trading debacle reveals that banks and regulators have learned few if any lessons from the financial crisis.
A lawsuit over Bank of America's mortgage portfolio could cost the bank tens of billions more than it had planned, prompting critics to say the bank has not set aside enough for a settlement.
To advise him on tax policy, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hires from a corporation infamous for avoiding taxes, while a bank regulator and a Beltway consulting firm swap top officials.
Lawsuit suggests employees across Morgan Stanley understood the housing market was in trouble and exploited that knowledge to bet against securities and unload garbage investments on the unsuspecting. The bank denies wrongdoing.
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