YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Hilsenrath

lines on the record: 131
first: 2025-10-31
most recent: 2025-10-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Who knew about all the battles and wrote decisive histories of it? And then he got the job at the Fed and he was fighting, he was refighting what he thought was a great depression moment, but he was doing it with these really high-tech financial instruments like credit default swaps and credit collateralized debt obligations and the like.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? It's like you seem thinking. I'll give you one little analogy since we're talking about the depression. My analogy for Ben Bernanke is imagine that you are a civil war. Historian at Wake Forest University. And you're an expert on the battlefields of the Civil War. Actually, let's call University of Virginia because Virginia was more center place. And you're an expert on the artillery and the battlefields and the personnel. And you know everything about the Civil War. And then you got a job as a consultant at the Pentagon. And you did such a good job as a consultant at the Pentagon that they made you the Defense Secretary. And then a new Civil War broke out, but it was being fought with drones and laser-guided miss. That's what happened to Ben Bernanke. He was a great depression historian.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them loose Yeah, and yeah, and there were a lot of consequences for that. It's funny you mentioned Rick because Rick, I went on with Rick on CNBC and he lectured me that I needed to be more opinionated in my questions at press conferences and reporting.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I think he was surprised by where it came from. I don't think he would have expected it to have come from the right.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, yeah. In fact, I remember a conversation I had with Bernanke way back then where he said like he expected a populist blowback.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but that's what I'm saying. The thing, what they recognized was that they were replaying the potentially the Great Depression, but the old story of a bank run had been altered. And now we were dealing with very exotic instruments and institutions that didn't fall under the institutions that didn't fall under the umbrellas.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in the Great Depression, what happened was the price didn't correct and readjust. The whole process of destruction fed on itself. And it became its own self-feeding equilibrium that took a decade to get out. And so that's the choice they made was that they didn't want to go down this path where banks start collapsing, there's no credit, businesses start collapsing, people get laid off, people have no money to spend, more banks collapse, more, you know, so like they were trying to short circuit that kind of process.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right price Mortgages had value. That's the age old debate in finance, right? If you bail them out, you're putting off all these hard decisions. Right. But basically, I remember talking to Bill Dudley about this, but basically what you're doing is trying to smooth out the curve so that there isn't as much damage today. You're bringing forward some activity by design, you're actually putting off some of the damage for the future. The alternative is you tear the band-aid off, you get to the right price. But the worry at the Fed at the moment was that they were replaying the Great Depression.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, the purpose, this is another thing I was always amused by how people on Wall Street reacted to stories because they very often thought the stories were foreign about them. But the purpose wasn't to get The end goal wasn't to get you guys to move out the risk curve. It was to ease financial conditions in a way that economic activity that was being put off for five years from now would take place now instead. It was to get people to generate economic activity today that was being deferred because people were so underwater or uncertain.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. That was QE too. Exactly what they wanted to happen. It's kind of crazy because it took down risk-free rates. Right. They wanted you to raise risk. And then so I don't know if you or other investors in your funds decided, all right, well, if we want to get a return, we got to move further out on the risk curve. That was exactly what they were trying. You just explained Quebe to an action the way they wanted to do it”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fed officials and reporters, that doesn't show up. Yes, Fed officials talk to reporters on background in certain circumstances. And so like, yeah, we did talk to Fed officials, not for attribution. But it was part of a very dynamic process. When I said, like, when I was writing stories about For instance QE too stands out to me like that was a situation where like they were moving towards making a decision about QE2 over several months. It took him like six to nine months to get there and that was a case where I was putting very kind of I was putting pieces of a puzzle together to be able to figure out how they didn't even know where they were going at the time. And so there was a lot of reporting that had to go in to understanding what was going on behind the scenes and which words that they used matter mattered and how they used them.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. Yeah, that I was going to say. Like, they weren't putting out announcements in 1989 when they did something. You had Fed watchers. That's what the original term Fed watcher. You had people in the markets who looked at what were going on with money market rates and the Fed injected X billion dollars. And they're like, oh, they just pushed up interest rates. And then it took you three days to figure out if that was their intention or an accident. And then so over the course of 30 plus years, they've become more and more transparent, right? So they started Greenspan, started putting out statements. Oh, and by the way, you know, Alan Greenspan just delighted in how obscure he could be in what he said because he wanted to confuse people. And they came to see over time that there was a benefit to just being clear. So they put out statements. They put out minutes, obviously. They started doing press conferences. Is there interaction between”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think by three quarters of a point, and the market started pricing in a succession of three-quarter point increases. And then the next thing you know, Orange County, California blew up and Mexico blew up, right? So they want their View of the world to be understood, and they do a lot of different things along those lines, they give speeches, they've become more, you know, back in the early 90s when I started on this beat, the Fed didn't tell anybody anything.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah. Okay. So there are a lot of pieces to this. The first one is you're right. There are two really important imperatives from their perspective, especially in the 2010s because the short-term interest rate had gotten to zero, what they realized was the only way they're going to affect financial conditions in a way that helps the economy is if they convince the markets that they're going to keep interest rates really low for a long time, then you get long-term rates down in addition. And so projecting a stance of dovishness for a long time became part of the mission, right? And that was part of what they wanted to do to influence the economy and financial conditions. But then the other thing, as you said, is they don't want to freak the markets out because that causes in their mind unnecessary turbulence that can be really damaging. And they're still haunted to this day by 1994 when Greenspan raised rates.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I had a responsibility to do the accountability stuff, and I couldn't let, you know, fear get in my way of doing that, that it was going to undermine. And, you know, there were times when I made them uncomfortable and I just had to do that.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that from the outside, maybe people would look at this and say, oh, he's getting spoon-fed these scoops and he's pulling his punches. He's not holding them accountable. But that third part was important to me. And I mean, I'd be happy to talk about stuff that we did on that front and what we did to try to hold the Fed accountable. Well, let's zoom in. And there's also this sense that those two things are in conflict, right? That, well, if you're holding their feet to the fire, they're not going to give you the next scoop. And my response is, first of all, they weren't spoon feeding these scoops. I had to work to get the information and put them in.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I used to preach this to colleagues all the time. As a beat reporter, I felt like this is really important to me. I had three responsibilities. One responsibility was to break stories, right? That was those Fed scoops. And it mattered, you know, if people were going to pay to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, they want something different in there. The other responsibility I had was to explain a complicated world. There were a lot of complicated things going on when I was covering the Fed with QE and zero interest rates. And I had to understand it and try to explain it to people. But then the third piece was holding powerful people and institutions accountable.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I push back and said there's a lot of reporting that went into those stories. I just wanted to say, and I don't know if this was among the things you wanted to ask, but I just wanted to describe for a second, like what my mentality was about, like what my job was. Right.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely true. Hey, I know that you have a bunch more things you want to ask about the Fed. Can I ask a few minutes ago about covering the Fed and being the Fed whisperer and being... Spoon fed, so to speak. Right. You did know”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I think that helps to explain why spreads are so tight right now, because people will buy whatever paper they can get.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, there's, I mean, there's a lot of economics in history here. What I'll say is I agree with you. We got fiscal policy exactly 180 degrees wrong after the financial crisis in the sense that What we needed was, and there was some fiscal stimulus right after the fact, but it wasn't sustained. We went, you know, we went to fiscal austerity within a year or two. What we needed was short-term stimulus and long-term fiscal. Austerity in order to get the budget under control. And what they did was short term austerity and nothing about the long term. And I'm still waiting, by the way, for the bond market to recognize this, and it doesn't seem to do that.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was all about how kind of trade had gone the wrong way for many Americans, how finance had gone the wrong way for many Americans and technology, and that people were angry and they were angry at the elites. And so to answer your question, the revolution started a long time ago. And I think we're pretty well into it. And I think a lot of this revolution has been, you know, We have digital guillotines now, right? Where cancel we'll cut off your head by your reputation? But sadly and disturbingly, it's now getting somewhat bloody.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On pitchforks, they used imagery of the French Revolution. I was seeing this back in 2014. It actually led me to write a series, a collection of stories with actually the most prolific Wall Street Journal, page one reporter of all time, a guy named Bob Davis, about the economic roots of what we call the economic roots of political discontent. By 2016, by 2015, I was getting death threats and we saw that there was like something going on in the country that was kind of deeper than your normal agitated reporter. And so we went out and wrote a bunch of stories called The Great Unraveling in 2016. I recall that.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I routinely got emails from people saying there's a revolution coming. And like they told me, like as a warning, they said there's a revolution coming. And when we come, you're going to be one of the people we string up on pitch.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The revolution has been building for years. And I'll take this back to my Fed beat. It's a little off the subject, but when I was covering the Fed by 2013-2014, I was regularly getting emails from really angry readers who saw the Fed as being at the center of America's problems, an example of an elite Wall Street institution hurting the little guy in favor of rich guys, an insider's game. And they saw me as a reporter at the Wall Street covering the institution. Had in their water. Yeah, as carrying their water.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Akin to the French Revolution and the American Revolution. And one of the things we know is that in revolutionary times, standards and norms get thrown into the air and redefined. Which came first?”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's another big year for the Supreme Court for sure. If you want to get really philosophical and pull the lens way back, I mean, I personally think we're living through revolutionary times.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then what does your cause mean? Lisa Cook's argument is that, well, so there's a definition for a cause, and I don't have the specific language in front of me, but it has to be for discrete malfeasance or neglect on the job in one of her defenses is that he isn't accusing me of doing anything wrong on the job. These were applications I submitted years ago. But then there's some fuzzy language that or the like or something to that effect. And so there was a question of whether there's enough gray area for the president to define what for cause means. On the first two things of, you know, Malfeasance on the job or neglect on the job, they don't seem to hold up, but there's some gray area on the third piece of that. And that's kind of legal precedent that's been said over many years.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the president has power to fire a Fed governor for cause. Then we get to, it hasn't happened. No president has tried. But then you get to our question was of, well, how, A, how do you define cause? And B, what is the process for defining cause and then going through the process of firing a Fed governor? This is all uncharted ground and it's moving to the Supreme Court to make some decisions now. There are a whole other set of decisions the Supreme Court has made where it has found that the president can fire heads of other agencies at his discretion. And one of the questions is whether firing a Fed official for cause is held to a higher standard than firing a participant in the National Labor Relations Board. And the Supreme Court, for reasons I can't say I fully understand, seems to be ready to draw a circle.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The chair of the FHFA is accusing the federal home finance administration or agency, is accusing Lisa Cook, another Fed governor of fraud and mortgage applications that she submitted to her banks in 2021. It's an unproven allegation, but they're trying to remove her for cause. The president has effectively announced that he's firing her for cause and she's challenging that. It could be in the Supreme Court.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I'm actually going to go straight into Lisa Cook in a moment. But so the president appointed Chris Waller. He's a Fed governor. He might get the chairman's job. He appointed Michelle Bowman. These were in his first terms, and she was given a promotion to vice chair of supervision. He's now appointed Stephen Mirin, who's made the president's case for much lower interest rates just last week. And so he's, in theory, one seat away from having four governors and a majority on the board, an opportunity to move the Fed in a whole new direction. And what's happened, it looked like that fourth governor job might be Jay Powell's job next year when his chairmanship ends. But what happened is now, and this gets a little complicated, but the”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One with the succession of J Powell and two with the construction of who the other governors are going to be on the Fed board and how loyal they'll be to the president's vision of how monetary policy should be run in the United States.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It happened with the Fed's cuts last year. And so he's putting on people and the institution who were he expects to be loyal to him. Stephen Miran is the latest. So there's a lot at stake. And there's turnover happening at the Fed right now. We all know there's going to be a new chairman appointed by the president next year. There are tests of loyalty. The really big issue is if the president gets four people who are loyal or even closely loyal to his views, he has an opportunity to remake the entire system. Because with a majority on the Fed board, there's seven board governors, with a majority of four on the Fed board, then the board can start firing and restructuring the regional banks that might oppose some of the policies that the president wants to pursue. So there's a lot at stake right now on two levels.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there were a lot of unknowns. What's happening now is the disagreement and division is politically driven, right? We all know that. But the president has a clear view of where he wants interest rates going. He wants all interest rates going down. I'm afraid a little more complicated than what He perhaps thinks he's going to get out of that because he might cut short term interest rates and get higher long-term interest rates which have been.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so, I mean, the Fed is a very consensus driven institution. When I was covering the Fed back in the financial crisis period, 2008, 2009, 2010, there was actually a lot of disagreement. At the time, the disagreement was internal and mostly in the regional Fed banks. So, I actually spent a lot of time talking to these regional Fed bank hawks to understand what their case was against programs like QE and interest rate cuts and things like that.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, you know, so there was reporting that went into that. There was understanding the institution. I became very good friends with the New York Giants beat report. I'm a big football fan. New York Giants beat reporter in those years. And we used to compare notes. Like, I saw my job in some way similar to what she was doing. I needed to know what was going on in the locker room. Right, and I needed to know kind of who the players were, what the game plans were, who the trainers were, like every angle of the locker room in order to get a whole picture and in order to say with authority what I thought was happening and what was going to go on next so that by game day was an FOMC meeting, by then I had already done the hard reporting. It was just a matter of saying, all right, here's what happened on the field.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of reporting, a lot of triangulation. You had to figure out where the debate was going inside the room and put enough pieces of the puzzle together in order to say this is what they're likely to do. And it was also very important. You know, people used to say, oh, how could his stories always be right? He's clearly being spoon-fed stuff. Well, there's a reason for that because I didn't report stuff I didn't know. So, you know, you had to do a lot of reporting to get to a point where you could say, all right, this is where they are and what they're going and where you could say, this is what we know about the kind of state of the debate or how certain, you know, there were some meetings where they weren't sure what they were doing going into it. And I wasn't going to get over my skis on that stuff.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't the kind of thing that, well, first of all, they only started doing press conferences. Sometime after, I guess it was around 2012. It was post-09, right? Four years, four years into the beat. Maybe it was 2010. I can't even remember anymore. But what went into the process of writing a Fed story was like you had to do”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we could talk for a long time about that, but I wouldn't say that that was exactly the way it worked. So, and this is kind of why I had, you know, was a little uppity about the Fed Whisperer thing, is it wasn't like there was some bat phone sitting at my desk and like the phone rang and it was like, oh, yes, Chairman Bernanke, what would you like me to say today? There was, you know, and my successor, Nick Timrose, is great at this. There was a lot of reporting that went into this. A lot of work. It wasn't like a spoon feeding kind of process. Process is a keyword and it was dynamic and complex. So, I mean, we could talk in some more detail about that.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the Fed pivot, and you know, so for me, it was the Fed whisperer. But since I left journalism and started my own business, now I'll use whatever I can to my advantage. So now I'm like, yeah, you can call me the Fed whisperer. I'll take that. But back in the day when people said it, I was like,”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny you ask. It actually used to really bother me when people said that because I thought, you know, my feeling when I was covering the Fed is it kind of trivializes what we're trying to do here. And the hard reporting that went into getting stories out of the institution and following the journalistic mission. So maybe I was a little righteous about being called the Fed whisperer back then Wall Street loves to attach these kind of two-word names to everything. So when I was covering the Fed, it was like the taper tantrum and QE infinity.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I was able to track this one boy's homework assignment from the Cesaro brothers backwards and then all the way to a paper, a newsprint facility in China. And I kind of used this boy's homework assignment to tell how global trade was changing the face of the economy.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I kind of pieced this together and actually used a little boy's piece of trash to tell the story. I found I went to a recycling facility in New Jersey where I still remember their name, the Cesaro brothers in New Jersey, right near the chipping containers. They had a container of recycled paper that was going off to China that let me pick through it, find a little boy's homework assignment that I made a photocopy of. I put the homework assignment back in the container where it belonged and I tracked the kid down”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I looked at what was booming and it turned out that our number three export in value and our number one export in volume was trash. We were the Saudi Arabia. Well, we were sending them recycled paper. We were sending them recycled plastic. We were sending them recycled metal. And they were turning that into the boxes and containers and packaging that all the toys and books and microwave ovens came back in.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had figured out an economist had told me, you know, everyone's talking about all these imports coming from China and how damaging it is for the US. You should look at what the US is exporting to China. Our exports to China are booming, and you should do a story about that.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a long story. But anyway, I worked on a story with a colleague in Thailand about how there was a global housing boom going on that was being funded by a global credit boom and increasingly complex credit, not just through banks, but through more sophisticated vehicles and sophisticated investor groups. And I quoted Robert Schiller in it. This is in June maybe of 2005 saying this was going to end in a global recession. And it connected the dots on something that was building. And it took a couple more years for it to really develop. I did another story, and the stories I love were the ones that were kind of looking around corners, but I did a piece, I think it was maybe 2003, 2004, looking at US-China trade.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, that's a long story. It was about an academic economist with an unusual background that it's too complicated to get into. I mean, if you want to, we can get into it, but.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I am most attached to those longer magazine feature stories. One of my favorites was a piece I wrote. In 2005, the spring of 2005. I actually had just been beaten badly by the New York Times on another story and was a little frustrated and disappointed with myself that I had gotten beaten.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you Well, I mean, I think a lot matters in kind of when at what price. Right. Right. So I know that they were working very hard all summer to raise capital in a number of deals, including with Korean investors. Fail to develop”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they survived. So, you know, it was coming at them fast and furious. And I mean, what's kind of remarkable is that they had all summer to prepare for it, and it still blew up in everybody's face.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source