Mark Pittman would have loved today

Heather Landy of American Banker writes Thursday about Mark Pittman, the Bloomberg News reporter who had the idea of asking the Federal Reserve Board to release the documents that showed which banks had borrowed money during the financial crisis.

Pittman died prematurely in November 2009 after initial requesting the documents in May 2008. Bloomberg continued the legal battle, filing a lawsuit in November 2008. The courts ruled on behalf of the business news organization, which resulted Thursday in the release of thousands of pages of documents.

Landy writes, “How Mark would have delighted in all this, not because he would have looked forward to spending his day opening PDF documents and doing the painstaking work of translating them into plain English, but because he understood and appreciated the fact that institutions – be they financial, political or otherwise – have a natural propensity to obfuscate.

“Mark died in November 2009 at the age of 52. He had a history of heart trouble, an irony not easily reconciled by anyone who knew just how much heart he had, for his work, for his family, for his colleagues and his friends. Mark taught me nearly everything I know about the credit markets. When I worked on the corporate finance reporting team he led for a time at Bloomberg, he warned me there was nothing he could offer to advance my writing – some editors are wordsmiths; Mark was not – but the one thing he could really teach me, he said, was ‘how to get people to tell you sh*t.’

“The disclosure and accountability Mark demanded of the Fed on behalf of his fellow citizens has been delivered now, and it will continue to be delivered, at least on a delayed basis, thanks to the portion of the Dodd-Frank Act instructing the Fed to identify discount window borrowers some two years after the fact.”

Read more here.