"All the Devils are Here" and business journalism

Vanity Fair writer Bethany McLean and New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, the authors of the new book “All the Devils are Here” about the financial crisis, have a number of interesting acknowledgements related to business journalism at the end of their book.

They write, “We owe a particular debt to reporters who wrote about the problems in the subprime world before they were revealed by the financial crisis; one article that stands out is the expose of Ameriquest published in the Los Angeles Times in 2005.”

Later, they add, “More broadly, in writing about the three decades of financial change documented in this book, we relied on the great contemporaneous work by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the American Banker, which we found particularly helpful in its in-depth coverage of regulatory skirmishes over capital requirements, as well as the politicial infighting that affected the financial industry during the years when most people weren’t paying attention to such things.”

McLean and Nocera also credit a number of books, including Gillian Tett’s “Fool’s Gold,” Michael Lewis’s “Liar’s Poker,” Charles Ellis’s “The Partnership” and Gregory Zuckerman’s “The Greatest Trade Ever.”

Nocera also notes that New York Times deputy business editor Winnie O’Kelley “took me aside not long before the crisis erupted in 2008 and told me in no uncertain terms that I would be well served to start focusing my column on the mounting problems on Wall Street. That was great advice, to say the least.”