Originally published as separate commentaries 2009-2014, consolidated and updated 2025
The 2008 financial crisis exposed not only systemic failures in banking and regulation, but fundamental weaknesses in financial journalism. From intimidation campaigns that silenced early warnings to post-crisis revisionism by pundits claiming prescience they never demonstrated, the media’s role in both enabling and mischaracterizing the crisis deserves scrutiny.
In 2012, Gillian Tett of the Financial Times revealed how five years earlier, she and fellow journalists were intimidated into backing off a massive story about banks manipulating LIBOR—the London Interbank Offered Rate that serves as a benchmark for mortgages, floating rate notes, and countless other financial instruments.
The intimidation was sophisticated and effective. The British Bankers’ Association and banks like Barclays strategically used the word “scaremongering,” a term that suggests irresponsible sensationalist reporting. Through lies and threats to journalists’ careers, they successfully silenced coverage. The Financial Times backed down, leaving the best ongoing coverage to come from ZeroHedge, a controversial blog with mostly anonymous writers that pounded the story harder than mainstream financial media.
2025 Update: The LIBOR manipulation scandal ultimately resulted in over $9 billion in fines across multiple banks, with criminal prosecutions in both the UK and US. Yet the intimidation tactics that initially suppressed coverage have only grown more sophisticated in the social media age, where financial institutions and their PR firms can orchestrate coordinated attacks on unfavorable coverage across multiple platforms.
This episode demonstrates a critical vulnerability in financial journalism: the effectiveness of coordinated intimidation campaigns against individual reporters whose careers depend on maintaining relationships with sources. When institutions can credibly threaten to “ruin careers,” as happened with LIBOR coverage, the public loses early warning systems precisely when they’re most needed.
I witnessed this dynamic firsthand at the Wall Street Journal‘s December 2009 Future of Finance Initiative in England. When I asked Chancellor Alistair Darling why massive financial fraud remained unaddressed, his confused response suggested this was exclusively a U.S. court problem. My follow-up—that we middle-aged financiers in the room were responsible for taking action before lawyers became necessary—was the last time “fraud” was mentioned at the conference. Neither my question nor the exchange was reported.
Bob Diamond, then Barclays President, defended financial innovation while omitting Barclays’ business relationship with Bear Stearns’s troubled hedge funds and remaining silent about LIBOR manipulation. In July 2012, Diamond resigned as Barclays CEO amid the LIBOR scandal, reportedly after threatening to expose embarrassing details about his interactions with bank regulators. Threats work better against journalists whose careers you can threaten than against complicit regulators who can ruin yours.
Whitney’s October 2007 Citigroup downgrade earned widespread acclaim, but the timeline reveals different insights. In early 2007, she rated Citigroup “sector perform” while appearing opposite Jim Rogers, who was already short the stock. By October 2007, three other prominent analysts already had sell ratings on Citi when Whitney followed with “sector underperform,” predicting the stock could trade in the low thirties and would cut its dividend.
The dividend cut was indeed a good call—one that Rogers had made months earlier when shorting the stock. By then, securitization had ground to a halt and everyone was taking losses. Whitney’s Bear Stearns coverage followed a similar pattern: she rated it “perform” and downgraded to “underperform” on March 14, 2008, as it tumbled 53% in one day. Clues to Bear’s problems were publicly reported in May 2007 when the Everquest IPO revealed CDOs from Bear Stearns Asset Management’s hedge funds landing on Bear’s balance sheet.
2025 Update: Whitney’s post-crisis career included founding her own advisory firm and making several high-profile municipal bond predictions that proved overly pessimistic. Her experience illustrates how media narratives around “prescient” calls often overlook the timing and context that separate genuine early warnings from well-timed but reactive analysis.
Whitney also continued to rate Lehman “outperform” even after Bear Stearns imploded in March 2008, downgrading to “perform” only at month’s end. Lehman collapsed in September 2008. Despite claims of receiving death threats over her Citi call—initially reported as “several,” later downgraded to “one”—the chronology suggests opportunistic positioning rather than brave early warning.
Taleb frequently referenced an August 2003 New York Times article to establish credentials as “the sage of our current predicament,” claiming he correctly predicted Fannie Mae had underestimated interest rate risk. But by August 2003, many others had already raised issues about GSE models and massive counterparty exposure—risks Taleb missed. The Times article also stated Fannie’s business plan seemed safe “since people typically do not default on their mortgages,” hardly establishing prescient credentials for a mortgage crisis.
More problematically, Taleb’s Empirica Kurtosis “black swan” fund had negative returns in 2001—the year of the ultimate black swan event, 9/11. The fund wound up in early 2005 with lackluster returns, suggesting the strategy itself was a “stranded swan.“
2025 Update: Taleb’s subsequent focus on “antifragility” and tail risk has found new audiences amid cryptocurrency volatility and geopolitical uncertainty. However, his continued emphasis on model failure over malfeasance as the primary cause of financial crises remains problematic. The 2008 crisis resulted from systematic fraud and regulatory capture, not simply “black swan” events that models couldn’t predict.
In 2009, Taleb prominently posted a GQ article crediting $20 billion in gains to a strategy employed by a new fund he advised. When questioned about the obvious error, Taleb initially claimed the article was about philosophy and numbers should be ignored. Under media pressure, he eventually explained the “$20 billion” referred to notional derivatives amounts that produced $250-500 million in gains—a significant difference that raised questions about strategy scalability during fundraising.
The democratization of financial commentary through blogging and social media created new forms of expertise inflation. A 2010 exchange between lawyer Rick Ungar and financial blogger Barry Ritholtz illustrates how credentials can be weaponized in financial discourse while obscuring substantive analysis.
When the SEC filed its case against Goldman Sachs in April 2010, Ritholtz published aggressive predictions about the prosecution’s strength, writing: “I put together this list based on what I know as a lawyer, a market observer, a quant and someone with contacts within the SEC.” He concluded by castigating others: “I’m not a lawyer, but… Then you should not be ignorantly commenting on securities litigation.”
Ungar’s response pointed out that while Ritholtz claimed authority “as a lawyer,” public records showed different registration status. More substantively, Ungar challenged Ritholtz’s claims of SEC insider knowledge, calling such assertions “pure crap and stated only for the purpose of making us believe that he is some ‘special player’ that we should all be listening to with rapt attention.”
The subsequent Goldman settlement—$550 million with Goldman admitting a “mistake” while sacrificial lamb Fabrice Tourre took the fall—vindicated neither aggressive prosecution predictions nor claims of insider knowledge. As SEC attorney James Kidney revealed at his 2014 retirement party, the agency was systematically timid, with senior officials treating SEC positions as résumé-building exercises before lucrative private sector jobs.
2025 Update: The credibility inflation documented in 2010 has exploded across social media, where “finfluencers” routinely make expertise claims without disclosure of credentials, conflicts, or track records. The pattern of weaponizing partial credentials while making insider knowledge claims has become standard practice across financial social media platforms.
CNBC serves primarily as financial entertainment, and viewers should approach it with expectations appropriate to Dilbert cartoons rather than serious journalism. Charlie Gasparino’s trajectory from CNBC to Fox Business exemplifies the medium’s limitations.
Gasparino’s July 2009 Goldman Sachs rant came very late to a party many others had been attending for years. While CNBC fails to drop every “f-bomb” except the most important one—fraud—Gasparino was easily fooled by Goldman’s assertion that it provided public service through liquidity provision. He failed to analyze key issues: Goldman’s undue influence over Treasury and Fed officials, and Wall Street’s need to make reparations to the U.S. Treasury.
2025 Update: The migration of financial media personalities between networks continues, with Maria Bartiromo’s 2013 move from CNBC to Fox Business following a pattern of talent following audience polarization rather than journalistic rigor. CNBC’s ratings struggles reflect broader challenges in financial media, where entertainment value often conflicts with the complex, technical analysis needed for meaningful coverage.
Consider Gasparino’s Bear Stearns coverage: In June-July 2007, Trader Monthly featured his profile titled “We induct a Wall Street icon,” celebrating Jimmy Cayne’s “guts” in building Bear Stearns. By August 2007, Gasparino’s mantra was “When I had dinner with Jimmy Cayne on Sunday night.” This cheerleading contrasted sharply with contemporaneous investigative work by Matt Goldstein at BusinessWeek, Jody Shenn at Bloomberg, and others who documented Bear’s CDO problems months earlier.
The pattern repeated with Merrill Lynch. In October 2007, Gasparino claimed CNBC was “ahead of everyone else” reporting Merrill’s write-downs “three weeks ago,” immediately after I noted my article “Subprime Mortgages: The Predators’ Fall” had warned about Merrill’s problems ten months earlier. Such after-the-fact claims of prescience became routine.
Not all television financial reporting deserves criticism. CNBC’s Diana Olick provided brilliant early reporting during the housing crisis—the best on any news channel. David Faber offered valuable context throughout the global financial meltdown. These examples prove quality financial journalism remains possible within commercial television constraints.
In October 2013, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, offering what amounted to an apologia for the Fed’s failed oversight during the 2008 crisis. Greenspan claimed he didn’t see the crisis coming because he thought bankers would be better stewards of their capital. According to Greenspan, banks didn’t understand their risks, neither the Fed nor banks can forecast well, and people on Wall Street are simply “screwy.”
Stewart’s response cut through the evasion: anyone would be incredulous looking at bank balance sheets leveraged 30:1. The comedian grasped what the former Fed chairman obscured—that widespread control fraud, not mere “screwiness,” was a major factor in the financial crisis.
Greenspan’s claims of surprise ring hollow when examined against his history. During the 1980s Savings & Loan crisis, Greenspan consulted for Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings & Loan Association, finding nothing wrong and advocating in 1985 for regulatory exemptions. Lincoln was seized in 1989, costing taxpayers $3 billion. Keating was convicted of fraud, later pleading guilty to additional federal fraud counts including admitting to fraudulently disbursing $975,000 shortly before Lincoln’s parent company declared bankruptcy.
When Lincoln failed, Greenspan expressed being “thoroughly surprised.” His 2013 descriptions of surprise about the 2008 crisis sound remarkably similar. As Fed chairman, Greenspan had direct experience with control fraud—systematic looting by executives who pay themselves lavish compensation while parasitically destroying their institutions. Yet he consistently frames systemic fraud as mere “screwiness” or unforeseeable complexity.
2025 Update: Control fraud patterns identified during the S&L crisis have evolved but persist. Recent examples include JPMorgan’s London Whale scandal and systematic consumer fraud across major banks. The lack of individual accountability that William K. Black documented during S&L cleanup continues to create what economists call “criminogenic environments” where fraud becomes rational business strategy.
When the Financial Times banking editor Gillian Tett interviewed Greenspan, she omitted his Lincoln Savings consulting role entirely—an egregious failure to provide relevant context about his track record with failed financial institutions. This represents a broader pattern where “access journalism” prioritizes maintaining relationships over accountability reporting.
The contrast between Stewart’s pointed questioning and Tett’s softball approach illustrates how comedy programming often provides more substantive financial accountability than specialized business media. Stewart understood that systematic regulatory failure requires specific explanations, not vague appeals to complexity and unforeseeable “screwiness.”
The digital media landscape has created new forms of bias that affect financial coverage. The Huffington Post’s pre-2016 election editorial policy exemplifies how platform bias can undermine journalistic credibility across all coverage areas, including finance.
HuffPost appended this editor’s note to Trump-related articles: “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims—1.6 billion members of an entire religion—from entering the U.S.”
2025 Update: This editorial approach, while abandoned post-2016, established precedents for partisan framing that now permeate financial journalism across digital platforms. When publications adopt explicit advocacy positions on political figures, it inevitably affects how they cover those figures’ business relationships, regulatory appointments, and economic policies.
The credibility consequences of such bias became stark in July 2025, when Congress defunded NPR and PBS over systematic partisan coverage. A presidential executive order stated that “neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” noting that government funding of news media had become “corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.” The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s governing statute explicitly prohibits contributing to political parties, yet both organizations were found to operate as partisan advocacy platforms rather than news services.
The defunding reflected broader recognition that media bias undermines credibility across all coverage areas. As one editorial noted, NPR “enjoys the tax-exempt privileges of a 501(c)(3) organization, yet operates as a de facto mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and progressive ideology.” When news organizations prioritize advocacy over accuracy, they lose the institutional credibility necessary for effective accountability journalism—particularly crucial in financial reporting where technical complexity already challenges public understanding.
The platform’s approach to financial content suffered similar credibility issues. Academic sources promoting Wall Street-friendly positions often went unchallenged, while investigations like those exposed by The Nation revealing undisclosed payments to academics received minimal coverage. Publications that prioritize access and advocacy over investigation create information gaps precisely when accountability reporting becomes most crucial.
A 2010 CNBC segment on financial regulation reform demonstrated how access journalism creates false consensus. In a panel discussion about predatory lending, every participant except one was either a CNBC anchor or contributor—a setup designed to reinforce predetermined narratives rather than examine evidence.
Even seemingly reasonable voices like former FDIC head William Isaac suggested banks weren’t central to subprime problems, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Major banks provided credit lines to top subprime lenders: Countrywide ($97 billion in loans) had lines from Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank. Without these credit facilities, predatory lenders couldn’t have scaled their operations.
The episode revealed how television financial journalism creates the appearance of debate while systematically excluding perspectives that challenge industry positions. When one participant presented documented evidence of bank involvement in predatory lending, the response was dismissal rather than engagement with facts.
2025 Update: This pattern has intensified across financial media, where “debates” typically feature variations of industry-friendly positions rather than substantive disagreement. Social media algorithms amplify this effect by creating echo chambers where financial professionals consume content that reinforces existing beliefs rather than challenges assumptions.
The patterns documented in these episodes persist today, amplified by social media echo chambers and algorithmic content distribution. Financial institutions have sophisticated media operations designed to shape coverage, particularly during crisis periods when accurate reporting becomes most crucial.
The patterns documented in these episodes persist today, amplified by social media echo chambers and algorithmic content distribution. Financial institutions have sophisticated media operations designed to shape coverage, particularly during crisis periods when accurate reporting becomes most crucial.
2025 Implications: The rise of social media has democratized financial commentary while fragmenting authority. Individual journalists face new forms of pressure through coordinated online harassment campaigns, while algorithmic feeds can suppress unfavorable coverage through engagement manipulation. Traditional financial media outlets struggle with subscriber economics that make them increasingly dependent on industry advertising and conferences.
Understanding these dynamics becomes crucial as new financial innovations—from cryptocurrency to complex ESG derivatives—require the same skeptical, technically competent coverage that was missing during the mortgage securitization boom. The cost of failed financial journalism isn’t measured in ratings points or click-through rates, but in economic devastation that falls disproportionately on those least able to protect themselves.
The question isn’t whether the next financial crisis will happen, but whether journalists will have the independence, technical competence, and institutional support necessary to provide early warnings before it’s too late to matter.
Janet Tavakoli is the president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, founded in 2003. She is a globally recognized structured finance expert and derivatives authority who predicted the 2008 financial crisis through her early warnings about collateralized debt obligations and credit derivatives risks.
Ms. Tavakoli has advised financial regulators, testified as an expert witness in major financial litigation, and authored definitive works on credit derivatives and securitization. Her Financial Times letters warning of systemic risk preceded the crisis by over a year, and her alternative bailout proposals were published during the height of the 2008 crisis.
*For comprehensive analysis of structured finance products and securitization strategies, consult Tavakoli Structured Finance.*
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