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 same critics who assailed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now attacking the Federal Housing Administration. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.
The taxpayer-backed mortgage giants, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, play a huge and growing role in the economy yet are riven by conflicts of interest and clashing goals. We examined the problems and solutions.
The home loan market was nationalized in a slapdash fashion and is now riven by conflicts of interest and competing goals. To solve it, a consensus is forming to head down the path of the least resistance but greatest risk.
It looks more and more as if Steve Cohen's returns at the hedge fund SAC have been generated not only through his trading brilliance but also through a culture of cutting corners. So why do major institutional investors still have any money with him?
The new Office of Financial Research was created to conduct independent analysis of systemic risks to the financial system, but so far it suffers from poor design and too many ties to big finance.
Obama sweeps into his second term with real advantages, including stronger appointees and more senators on his side. But the problems run so deep that he is unlikely to solve them.
While interest rates are low, margins on mortgages are high, giving banks a bonanza. Competition should lower rates, but the bank bailout fostered a cartel.
Freddie officials wanted to protect the company's bottom line and some sought to nix a backdoor economic stimulus. The consequence: Homeowners stayed trapped in high-rate loans.
In an effort to wind down the bank bailout program, the government is trying to sell its preferred stock holdings of the remaining smaller banks, but the potential losses from the auctions could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sandy Weill and others are being celebrated for now calling for breaking up megabanks. The many debacles on their watch seem to have cost them absolutely nothing in fashionable society.
A proper market would want an organization that was impartial, regulated, transparent and open to appeal, but with credit default swaps, there is no such luck.
When banks are in trouble, they often mislead the world about their financials. Maybe JPMorgan disclosed everything properly about its $2 billion loss, but that's what we need to determine.
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