Post's Pearlstein is all over covering the economy

Harry Jaffe of the Washingtonian profiles Washington Post business columnist Steve Pearlstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.

Jaffe writes, “Pearlstein filed from Taos, flew to DC, and started pounding out columns. He was used to writing twice a week. Two became three, with a few hitting the front page. Disastrous news on your beat is good for a columnist. He started appearing on TV and showing he could explain the Wall Street calamity better than many economists.

“‘I saw the froth in the takeover deals and the commercial-real-estate deals, and when the very early problems started to come out about subprime, I connected the dots and saw it all as part of a much wider credit bubble that was caused by across-the-board deterioration of lending standards,’ Pearlstein says.

“Standards. Value. Greed. Corruption. Pearlstein, who turns 57 this month, wrote about the intricacies of credit swaps and explored the motives and human frailties that drove money managers over the cliff. ‘If there is a surprise here,’ he wrote on October 3, ‘it is that anyone should be surprised by the level of greed on Wall Street.'”

Read more here.