Name Dropping

Among the media outlets covering the financial crisis, I’ve been partial to the work of The American Prospect and Mother Jones. We often point out relevant (and usually excellent) articles by Tim Fernholz, who is a staff writer at the American Prospect and a fellow with us here at the New America Foundation. Alyssa Katz, who we featured in an event earlier this year, was recently awarded the Harry Chapin Media Award for an American Prospect piece on how housing speculators are undermining revitalization efforts.

Noam Scheiber has also produced some great work, especially focused on the politics at play in the financial reform debates. Noam is a senior editor at the New Republic and recently was named a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. We are happy to have him in-house. And then there is Mike Konczal, author of the blog Rortyblog and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, who has a background in financial services and has been helpful in explaining for his readers the mechanics of how the financial sector actually operates. Mike will be joining us for an upcoming discussion on revisiting policy assumptions in the wake of the Great Recession.

At Mother Jones, I wanted to highlight the work of Andy Kroll, who has been on the beat for a while now and has been monitoring what is at stake in both the legislative battle to pass financial reform and now implementation. Here is a link to Andy’s latest piece, which explains some of the recent controversy around foreclosures. At issue is role that servicers play in creating an assembly line-like foreclosure process. That’s good if you want to process as many foreclosures through the system as possible, but not so good if you want to make sure proper steps are taken to determine who exactly owns title to the home. As Andy says, it is kind of a big mess right now and just the type of situation that the new consumer financial protection bureau should be called on to address.

Keep up the good work, guys.