Banking/Finance

The roundtable on Monday night's Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC was not kind to the New York Times's hit piece on Sunday's front page that blamed President Bush and only Bush for the mortgage meltdown, ignoring the Democrats in Congress who protected the irresponsible push for more "affordable housing" by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (as Times Watch noted yesterday). Nina Easton, Washington…

 This is a timely op-ed from Dan Gainor of BMI.Christmastime is the time of giving. So we can thank Bernie Madoff for giving Americans some special gifts this holiday season.Yes, I said thank him. OK, maybe not a lot. But the one-time financial wizard's downfall is a morality tale that provides so many lessons it's almost impossible to know where to start. If you've been living under a rock, the…

UPDATE AT END OF POST: White House issues statement concerning "Irresponsible Reporting by New York Times."It's official: the housing and financial crisis gripping the nation is President George W. Bush's fault.So said the New York Times Sunday in a 4900-word, front page hit piece entitled "The Reckoning - Bush's Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire."And what was this heinous, catastrophic…

On December 18, in an item that appeared on Page C1 of its December 19 print edition (the graphic at the right is a scaled-down version of what appears at the top of the online version), the New York Times's Wendell Jamieson provided us his perspective on what has became a Christmas staple, Frank Capra Jr.'s "It's a Wonderful Life." I would suggest that the piece reveals a lot more about the…

Full disclosure, you can take the day off. CBS's "The Early Show" included a statement in its Dec. 18 report on the Big 3 bailout from "auto industry analyst," Dan McGinn. Letting the massive car companies fail "would be like 10 Katrinas hitting America at the same time," McGinn asserted. "The American public understands that." What the report didn't say is that McGinn is also an adviser…

In a softball profile of the liberal Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank on Sunday’s CBS 60 Minutes, anchor Lesley Stahl led with: "Barney Frank has been called the smartest guy in Congress, which is lucky for us, since he works on some of the thorniest issues around. The 14-term, 68-year-old Harvard-educated Democratic congressman from Massachusetts is chairman of the House Financial Services…

The proposed automaker bailout has a big stamp on it that says "union-built," but the news media hasn't noticed. Over the past month, accusations have been flying against several Southern senators who oppose a $14 billion bailout for the beleaguered big three automakers and support the the alternative of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. These senators, critics say, are representing the interests of…

As Americans across the fruited plain worry about their jobs and how they're going to make ends meet during the current recession, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman showed Sunday morning just how separated from reality and the common man he actually is.Appearing on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said that he wasn't worried about how expensive president-elect Barack Obama's economic…

The wires services and the rest of the Old Media have also been reporting on a scandal that doesn't have to do with Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich. But, like the Blago story line, the media seem to be forgetting one small aspect of the story of Wall Street rip off artist Bernard Madoff. Like Blago, Madoff's connections to the Democrat Party seem to be of little interest to the media. Very…

Poor, poor Gideon Rachman. The Financial Times's chief foreign affairs columnist and blogger can't understand why people got so upset at him.He responded to a volume of disagreeable e-mails reacting to his December 9 column on the idea of having one world government in two different blog posts (the photo at the top right is from his blog): "Covered in Internet Slime" (December 10) and "Final…

Promise, or threat?  John Harwood declares "the New York Times isn't going anywhere."  The Times correspondent, who also toils for CNBC, made his unconditional claim on today's Morning Joe in response to Joe Scarborough's envisioning of a future in which major news organizations, including the Times, might disappear. Scarborough was concerned that the public would be deprived of the media's…

If print is becoming journalism's dying backwater, Paul Krugman isn't showing it. In a Dec. 6 interview in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist told the ironically named Adam Smith, editor-in-chief of Nobelprize.org, that he found himself more effective in his role at the Times lately He said he was more influential in shaping policy as a journalist than he would…

Democrats, including president-elect Barack Obama and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, received more money in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other members of Congress.You couldn't tell that from an Associated Press article published Sunday which completely blamed Republicans for the lack of regulation and oversight of Freddie Mac.In fact, when…

"Talk about too big to fail," said managing editor of Time Richard Stengel on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Dec. 4, who was on the program promoting the latest cover story for the magazine entitled, "The Case for Saving Detroit." Stengel: "I find the fact that so many Americans are unsympathetic to Detroit to be kind of amazing," Stengel said: We make the case that in fact the, you know, the Big…