The most important financial journalist of the generation

Dean Starkman profiles New York Times business writer Gretchen Morgenson in the latest edition of The Nation in an article that calls her the most important financial journalist today.

Starkman writes, “At 53, Morgenson is at the height of her career, read and feared in the corridors of power running from Wall Street to Washington. As a reporter and columnist (a controversial dual role), she is enormously productive. During the period following Lehman’s bankruptcy, her byline appeared on major stories on Henry Cisneros and good housing goals gone bad, Merrill Lynch’s collapse, corrupted rating agencies and Washington Mutual’s boiler-room culture, in addition to the September 28 blockbuster on AIG — not to mention weekly 1,200-word columns on everything from rating-agency hypocrisy (‘They’re Shocked, Shocked, About the Mess,’ October 26) to a convoluted tax deal that imperiled an Indiana electrical cooperative (‘Just Call This Deal Hoosier Baroque,’ December 21).

“She breaks business-press taboos constantly. Her prose is blunt; some even say crude. (‘Everybody knows that executive compensation at many companies has been obscene. What everybody does not know is how obscene obscene is now,’ she wrote in February 2006 in a not untypical column.) Morgenson doesn’t just cover subjects but sometimes hammers them into submission, as when she banged out more than three dozen stories on Countrywide in 2007 and 2008 and almost single-handedly made CEO Angelo Mozilo the face of a rogue industry. Not coincidentally, on June 4 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mozilo with securities fraud, alleging that he misled investors about the increasing risks Countrywide was taking with loans that Mozilo privately called ‘toxic.’

“At this point, it is almost impossible for business reporters and editors not to have an opinion about Morgenson. Supporters cheer her tell-it-like-it-is style; detractors call her simplistic and agenda-driven. In certain Wall Street and business circles, she is flatly detested.”

Read more here.