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.
Adding an explosive new dimension to a politically charged debate on how to solve the housing crisis, the mortgage giants say that reducing the amount of money troubled homeowners owe wouldn't just keep families in their homes, it would also save Freddie and Fannie money.
In late
2010, a major regulator warned the Federal Reserve: Banks are not healthy
enough to increase dividends, and the economy could implode again. But in its
biggest decision since the financial crisis, the Fed overrode that advice and
let banks return more than $30 billion to shareholders. Here’s the inside
story.
Bank lobbyists couldn't kill the Volcker Rule, intended to stop banks from risking taxpayer money on risky speculation. So they're getting Congress and regulators to render it morbidly obese and bedridden.
The Sarbanes Oxley law, also known as SOX, cleaned up corporate accounting. It provides hope for how the new financial regulatory law, Dodd-Frank, could work.
Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., today sent a series of questions to Freddie’s regulator, highlighting how much remains unknown about the mortgage giant’s controversial bets against American homeowners.
In aletter to Senator Robert Casey, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said ithalted mortgage giant Freddie Mac’s controversial trades because they required specializedrisk management.
After an examination by its regulator, Freddie agreed not to make new investments that profited from homeowners staying trapped in high interest-rate mortgages. But Freddie has kept billions worth of those investments.
The taxpayer-owned mortgage giant made investments that profited if borrowers stayed stuck in high-interest loans while making it harder for them to get out of those loans.
Under Romney, Bain Capital used debt liberally to generate high returns. Now, when the U.S. can borrow at low rates, his own leveraged buyout logic should dictate that the government borrow more -- not less.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has been scared to bring big banks to trial for wrongdoing that helped cause the financial crisis. But that strategy fails to hold the big banks accountable and weakens the SEC's negotiating position.
A secret confederacy of Occupy Wall Street sympathizers is criticizing the financial industry for becoming a machine to enrich itself, fleecing customers and exacerbating inequality.
Bloomberg story shows that while we still haven’t had a full accounting of the financial crisis, we did have a Treasury Secretary sharing what amounts to inside information with a few elite Wall Street traders. Here are some questions that demand answers.
After the CDO conflagration, the SEC has wrung measly settlements from banks and charged only two bankers, both low-level, while letting their bosses scamper away. That needs to change.
As a draft of the Volcker rule has made the rounds in the last several weeks, it has alternatively caused fits of despair and cries of exultation. And that’s just among the proponents of the regulation.
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