Economic Armageddon: Gretchen Morgensen on How Wall Street Broke the Economy

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on July 26, 2011, Printed on July 29, 2011

Gretchen Morgensen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her "trenchant and incisive" coverage of Wall Street and has been on that beat ever since. Her new book, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (written with Joshua Rosner), lays out the toxic interplay between Washington, Wall Street and corrupt mortgage lenders that led to the meltdown. It examines how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect us from financial harm were actually complicit in creating the crisis.

Gretchen Morgenson is a business reporter and columnist at the New York Times, where she also serves as assistant business and financial editor. Prior to joining the Times in 1998, she worked as a broker at Dean Witter in the 1980s, and as a reporter at Forbes, Worth, and Money magazines.

Terrence McNally: What do you consider your path to the work you do today?

Gretchen Morgensen: I worked on Wall Street for three years, not a long time, but I did get a really good sense of how that place operates. People on Wall Street are extremely smart, aggressive and creative. They are also the intermediary for a lot of companies trying to raise capital, and can be a real facilitator for good. But in this crisis, that got started with a vengeance in the early ‘90s and built up to where we were in 2008 when many of these firms had to be taken over, Wall Street has had more of a pernicious impact. Some of their creativity has been used not to benefit investors, not to benefit Main Street, but simply to benefit themselves.