Bloomberg reporter who sued the Fed has died

I read his basic premise for forecasting and it seems uncannily solid.
The wildcard is the fact the FED has essentially commandeered the marketplace. Irrespective of this glaring detail how is it possible to equate any cycle accurately ? Further and most important is the question, How does the judge in this case still have a viable surety bond with which to
work ? Is Armstrongs attorney a complete dumbass, or a BAR leech or both
This man has been in jail for 7 years with no trial ?? WTF people. You want your republic back, start kicking the asses of the judges where you live.
Start filing criminal complaints against them, they break laws with the regularity of crap through a goose. Learn your state code of criminal procedure and state penal code, court watch, talk to people going into court, go to the clerk of the court and demand to see all warrants issued for the month..It is your right....How can we honestly sit back and say we want freedom and liberty as we have 5% of the worlds population and 50% of the prison population...This bullshit that if it doesn't effect me then I don't care has to go. It does effect you, your goddamn taxes are paying to keep alot of people in jail or parole when we'd all be better off if they were out with a job. It has a nifty way of protecting your liberties because then these courts know they cant create a police state without a little friction. And for Gods sake if your in Manhattan get a Habeas Corpus to this judge along with a tort claim as well as a suit for his bonding company. If he breaks a law relating to his office he is personally civilly responsible, sue that bastard.....CRACK A BOOK LEARN THE LAW OR WE'RE ALL DEAD MEAT.

A few years ago a dear friend died of a "heart attack", which was completely unexpected. He was a tireless researcher in an area unpopular with NASA. He published his name and results online without fear. Our whole research website shut down immediately. Everyone scattered.

I have always felt there was something very unnatural about his death (as did others) He was a relaxed but active guy with everything good in his life. Not a Type A, no heavy food or drink, non smoking, semi retired and happy. He was a scientist.

I would like to know what might be used to cause death in this way. Maybe its a case for wearing gloves...not kidding.

i asked mr. ivry if he knew of a book mr. pittman might possibly have been working on concerning the federal reserve and any corruption he may have found as i am sure many would have loved the chance to have read it. in mr. ivry's reply he stated that he and mr. pittman talked about it but a book was never written. mr. ivry then closed his reply by saying how we can build on mr. pittman's work though and do something great.

http://digg.com/business_finance/Mark_Pittman_Reporter_Who_F...

Well, I guess all the things I have accomplished did not get done, eh?
These people need to hear truth. We all ought to say what is in our hearts in my opinion. But hey, who am I to tell you what to do, when clearly someone assigned you to tell me what to do, right?
;)
Not everyone has to be as harsh as I am, but it does no harm to have a few of us pushing the edge. Indeed, I get a LOT done by forcing people to do what is uncomfortable, but right.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. — John Adams

Now let's see what they can do to with the Fed...

There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: The regeneration of the inner man. — Tolstoy

When you start making phone calls to these people it freaks them out.
They don't know how to respond. The people working for the coroner there in NY would leave me laying on the phone on a counter for 30 mins sometimes.
Then someone would come along and hang the phone up like it was just left ther with noone on the other end, I'd call back....My phone bill was not good but I let them know there were people outside family that cared about what was happening. We've got to get back to that or we're in for really tough times.

It would seem that his outgoing message was in conversation over the background story of how Arlo Guthrie, Woody's son's, movie and song, "Alice's Restaurant", which has become more than a hippy cult film for Thanksgiving celebrations...

I heard the movie was going to be played in it's entirety on THE RADIO here, in honor of our community being so "hip", to the Guthries.. The photo of Woody's guitar is famous. He saw the guitar as a tool to "kill the facists" (and I bet that's got black roots)...

The last part was put in there to respectfully show freedom fighters, we have lost a big one.

I agree with you about the "support the troops" stickers. Again, just sheeples who have no earthly idea of the misery going on over there in the name of "spreading democracy" which we can't even do right over here.

How about instead of spreading democracy we come home and repair the Republic which is in dire need of a Constitutional makeover?

Pawnstorm

I stated that this sudden death seemed convenient for the Federal Reserve. And asked for his take on what happened. If you feel inclined to you might ask him the same thing. Let them know that these things aren't happening in a vacuum.

Mark Pittman, Reporter Who Foresaw Subprime Crisis, Dies at 52
Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A

By Bob Ivry His email : bivry@bloomberg.net

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Mark Pittman, the award-winning investigative reporter whose fight to open the Federal Reserve to more scrutiny led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and win, died Nov. 25 in Yonkers, New York. He was 52.

Pittman suffered from heart-related illnesses. The precise cause of his death wasn’t known, said his friend William Karesh, vice president of the Global Health Program at the Bronx, New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

A former police-beat reporter who joined Bloomberg News in 1997, Pittman wrote stories in 2007 predicting the collapse of the banking system. That year, he won the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in financial journalism, for “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” a series of articles on the breakdown of the U.S. mortgage industry.

“He was one of the great financial journalists of our time,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics. “His death is shocking.”

Pittman’s fight to make the Fed more accountable resulted in an Aug. 24 victory in Manhattan Federal Court affirming the public’s right to know about the central bank’s more than $2 trillion in loans to financial firms. He drew the attention of filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, who gave him a prominent role in their documentary about subprime mortgages, “American Casino,” which was shown at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival in May.

‘One Reporter’

“Who sues the Fed? One reporter on the planet,” said Emma Moody, a Wall Street Journal editor who worked with Pittman at Bloomberg. “The more complex the issue, the more he wanted to dig into it. Years ago, he forced us to learn what a credit- default swap was. He dragged us kicking and screaming.”

James Mark Pittman was born Oct. 25, 1957, in Kansas City, Kansas, where he played linebacker on the high school football team. He took engineering classes at the University of Kansas in Lawrence before graduating with a degree in journalism in 1981. He was married soon after and had a daughter, Maggie, in 1983. The marriage ended in divorce.

Pittman’s first reporting job, covering the police department for the Coffeyville Journal in southern Kansas, paid so little he took a part-time job as a ranch hand across the Oklahoma border in Lenapah, according to an interview he gave to Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit, a watchdog for the business press.

‘Huge Personality’

“What a funny guy -- huge personality,” Chittum said in an e-mail message. “Mark was my favorite reporter working. In a time when too much journalism is timid or co-opted, Mark personified the whole ‘afflict the comfortable’ tenet of the business. Mark’s passing is a huge loss for journalism at a time when we can least afford it.”

Pittman spent a year in Rochester, New York, with the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper and 12 years at the Times Herald- Record in Middletown, New York, where he met his second wife, Laura Fahrenthold-Pittman in 1995.

“All I know is we fell in love the moment we met,” Fahrenthold-Pittman said in an interview Friday. “We moved in together a week later. He was as serious about his family life as he was about work. Mark did nothing in a small way.”

Pittman joined Bloomberg News in 1997. In 2007, he was writing about the securitization of home loans when subprime borrowers, who have bad or limited credit histories, began missing payments on their mortgages at a faster pace.

S&P, Moody’s

His June 29, 2007, article, headlined “S&P, Moody’s Hide Rising Risk on $200 Billion of Mortgage Bonds,” was excoriated at the time by Portfolio.com for “trying to play ‘gotcha’ with the ratings agencies.”

“And that really isn’t helpful,” said the unsigned posting.

Pittman’s story proved prescient. So did his reports on U.S. banks exporting toxic mortgages overseas, on Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson’s role in creating those troubled assets while he was chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and on the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc.

“He’s been on this crisis since before the crisis,” said Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial columnist for the New York Times. “He was the best at burrowing into the most complex securities Wall Street could come up with and explaining the implications of them to readers of all levels of sophistication. His investigative work during the crisis set the standard for other reporters everywhere. He was a giant.”

‘Fearless, Trusted’

In the “Faustian Bargain” series, Pittman explained how 5 percent of U.S. mortgage borrowers missing monthly payments could lead to a freeze in lending throughout the world.

“Mark Pittman proved to be the most fearless, most trusted reporter on the most important beat during the 12 years he wrote about credit markets, corporate finance and the Federal Reserve at Bloomberg News,” said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler. “His colleagues will miss his laughter and generous sense of mission. Bloomberg readers were rewarded by his many achievements culminating with a federal court ruling validating his search for records of taxpayer-financed policies withheld from the public and the Gerald Loeb Award.”

Public policy would be more effective if reporters, lawmakers and citizens understood how the financial system worked and why the crisis happened, Pittman said in the Feb. 27, 2009, interview with Chittum.

“Hopefully, we will be able to inform the people enough to know how badly we’re getting screwed,” he said with a laugh. “We need to know how to prevent it from happening again, and we need to know who did it.”

Booming Laugh, Bourbon

Standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 meters) with a booming laugh, a loud telephone voice and a taste for bourbon, Pittman made lifelong friends on Wall Street, in Congress, in journalism circles and in the artistic community after he and his wife opened an art gallery in Yonkers in 2005.

“I always learned something new when I spoke with Mark,” said Representative Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. “He was dogged in pursuit of the truth. This is a great loss for journalism and for those who relied on Mark for his insight.”

In “American Casino,” the title of which comes from an expression Pittman uses in the documentary, the filmmakers profile subprime borrowers who are losing their homes, mortgage brokers who made loans they knew their customers could never repay and bankers and ratings analysts whose companies profited from the housing boom.

Celebrating Life

Pittman provides an anchor for the narrative, at one point searching the Bloomberg terminal and finding the mortgage of a Baltimore teacher going through foreclosure inside a security underwritten by Goldman Sachs.

“He was a wonderful friend, a seeker of truth, a fighter for right, a proud family man, a big and jovial hand, a lover of food, drink and celebration of life,” said Joshua Rosner, managing director of Graham Fisher & Co., a consulting and analysis firm in New York. “This is a personal loss, a professional loss and a societal loss. He is truly irreplaceable.”

Along with his wife and daughter Maggie, Pittman is survived by daughters Nell, 10, and Susannah, 8, from his second marriage; his father Warren Pittman; mother Donna Pittman- Nealey; and brothers Barry Pittman and Craig Pittman.

“He was so large -- in spirit and in person -- and his passion for his craft was so great, it is impossible to think that it could just end,” said Jeffrey Taylor, Pittman’s editor on the “Faustian Bargain” series.

Bloomberg’s lawsuit against the Fed, which was filed after Pittman’s requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act were denied, continues without him. The central bank won a delay pending an appeal, which is scheduled for the week of Jan. 4.

At the time of his death, Pittman’s outgoing messages offered a link to a black-and-white photo of Woody Guthrie. Written on Guthrie’s guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.net.

My Digg comment which sent chills down my own spine...

"Is Doctor Ron Paul next?"

Let them touch him and see what happens.

Presidents, Congresspeople, Senators.....I guess I have to ask are there any
people in law enforcement willing to investigate these FED people and make an honest effort at getting indictments ? I've about had it with convenient suicides, anyone agree ?