Bartiromo on predicting the economic crisis

CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo has a long interview with Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” on Wowowow.com in which she talks about her career, including being harassed on the New York Stock Exchange floor by the GE specialist and her opinions of recent coverage.

Here is an excerpt:

LESLEY: You need courage. But the press – we’re supposed to be the watchdog. And I don’t know if there’s been enough chest banging, you know, beating up on ourselves, so that it won’t happen again, because we weren’t wearing the watchdog hat, which is a huge part of our job.

MARIA: But the press has to be definitely taking more responsibility. And, you know, I agree that you really need to recognize that there were things missed; real things missed. Having said that, if you look at CNBC for example, all we do is business, all we do is the markets. At any given time in that period from 2006 to 2009, at any given moment in time, you could have seen Robert Shiller on air saying, “This is a house of cards about to fall.” You could have seen George Soros on air, I’ve interviewed him a number of times throughout that period saying, “I would be shorting this market. I’m betting against it.” You could have seen, at the same time, Angelo Mozilo saying, “Mortgages should be sold and mortgages should be taken out. This is the greatest time – Goldilocks economy.”

MARIA (CONT): So I want to make sure that I  … we’re on the air, on business in the market, 24/7, 14 hours of live programming. And at any time you could have seen both sides of the story. So I want to make sure that that’s out there as well, because we certainly had a number of bears in that period on the story saying, “This is not sustainable.” But there was a moment in time, a mentality ingrained, that everything was great, and home prices would keep going up.

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