The Effects Of Reporting The Financial Crisis On Subprime...

Different levels of analyses adopted in this research shed a new perceptive light on the reality of reporting the financial crisis in 2007 in which business journalists were troubled by a plethora of slanted opinions that never coalesced into a coherent examination of the problem. Comment discrepancies and all kinds of implausible interpretations from high-ranking financial pundits might partially explain why despite a large number of business stories issued during the crisis the media remained baffled and uncertain about the length and depth of the downturn. However, that financial journalism put aside investigative reporting, as well as the fact that it could not adopt a critical view about the functioning of the system and identified†¦show more content†¦Between 1999 to 2004, more than two dozens of US states ranging from North Carolina to South Carolina, California to New York passed various forms of anti-predatory lending laws stipulating a lower interest rate threshol d requiring credit disclosure (Starkman, 2014:202) in an effort to respond ferociously to lawless lending practices at Wall Street and hold Wall Street originators of MBS to account. Critical, hardest-hitting investigative stories were prevalent during this time. When the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) conducted cases against the most notorious names in the subprime lending industry, i.e. Citigroup, JP Morgan, Delta Funding Corp., etc., many business newspapers also considered abusive lending their central beat and published a wide range of delicately-told stories going into the dubious and execrable practice of Wall Street banks in impressive depth (â€Å"Easy Money: Subprime Lenders Make Killings Catering to Poorer Americans. Now Wall Street Is Getting in on the Act†, BusinessWeek, 4/24/00; â€Å"Along with a Lender, Is Citigroup Buying Trouble?†, NYT, 23/10/00; â€Å"Fed Assesses Citi Group Unit’s $70m in Loan Abuse†, NYT, 5/28/04; etc.) . These art icles put individual banks engaging in the foray of subprime lending under the spotlight with real information about secret sources of money and the compensation culture that