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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“And if it was bad collateral, they couldn't do it. And then the other problem that weekend was that they were starting to worry about who was going to be the next one to fail. AIG, you have a lot of, I mean, once, you know, if they bailed out Lehman, then the market's target was going to point to Merrill Lynch, right? So like, so they were just happy to get Merrill Lynch bought that week. That's right. John says.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Issue, yeah. And the rules that the Fed was trying to abide by at the very edge of its authority was that they had to lend against good collateral. Right.”
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 all hell broke loose, and they realized that if they didn't do something, that things were going to get much worse. So it was the markets weren't a panic. And I think the policymakers panicked. And at that point, they just were doing whatever they could to put out fires wherever they could.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was sequential. I mean, remarkably, right? So, I mean, what they were telling me Sunday night was that they hoped that they had enough of these facilities, rescue facilities in place. Boy, I can't even remember all the acronyms anymore. But, you know, the liquidity that they were pumping into the other investment banks. And they hoped that they had enough of these facilities in place in order to keep the system stable the next day. People forget the Fed had a policy meeting on Tuesday. They didn't cut interest rates two days later. Like Bernanke had a view that he thought that he had the situation under control. And they realized, you know, before AIG on Tuesday, on Monday, there was the money market mutual funds that broke the box.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was, I think, seen as the heir apparent, but he had just moved to London, so they had no one else. And like I had learned a lot about markets. I had been writing about economics. I was just well placed. So they asked me to go to move down to Washington in the summer of 2008 to cover the Fed. And my first week on the job, Lehman Brothers blew up.”
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 guy that my future boss really wanted for the paper had just moved to London, a guy named Mark Whitehouse, who's a Bloomberg opinion. Yep, I know that name, for sure. Brilliant, brilliant guy”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I had a roadmap for how it worked. And then obviously in 2008, I mean, the U.S. markets were imploding. It was very complicated. It was credit driven. Our star-fed reporter left the paper that summer to go to the Economist magazine, Greg Ypp. He was a legend.”
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, you know, like my goal at the journal was always, well, I just wanted to write good stories, right? And the journal back when I started at the place was, ironical, you think of it as a finance, economics, markets kind of paper. And that's how I, you know, I grew up reading the New York Times and watching my dad read the Wall Street Journal. That stuff just didn't interest me. But what I discovered over time was that the You had to be able to write long feature stories to succeed, page one stories, we called them leaders. So like that's what I was focused on doing. What happened was by 2008, I had learned a lot, basically, in part from my experiences in Asia, you know, where I covered these banks collapsing and I saw a financial crisis and I kind of felt”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follow the police's orders, the second plane flies right over my head. And I stuck around and interviewed witnesses and bystanders. And it was pretty horrowing day”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The managing editor of the paper. I said, Hey, I'm here. I'm here early. I'm on it, what do you want me to do? And his advice was go figure out what happened and don't get yourself killed. So, like, he immediately understood that something serious was at hand. So I grabbed a notebook and ran over that pedestrian bridge, saw a lot of carnage in the street, and started kind of writing, well, the next thing I did was call my wife to let her know that there was a fire and I was okay because I figured it was going to be on the news within a matter of minutes. And she knew where I was. So I called her to let her know I was okay. And then a few minutes later, as I'm in the street, the cops are trying to clear me out. They're saying, you can't be here. This is a dangerous place. So they're trying to move me out of the street. I walk. And then as I'm walking kind of to...”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that day, so uh, well, so I'll tell you exactly what I did. The first thing I did when I saw the Inferno from the first plane is I ran downstairs to, I was where the reporters were stationed. I knew that top editors were down a floor, so I ran down there to see who was here and who was organizing things. I ran to Paul Steiger.”
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, yeah, yeah. We were across the street from that too. Anyway, I happened to be in early that morning trying to finish a story and I was heading over to the World Trade Center for an NABE conference. And journal reporters tended to get in a little bit after nine because we tended to have late deadlines. I was in early, was there for the first plane to hit. And then I ran out into the street with a notebook second plane flew right over my head. Wow. Yeah.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we were across the street in the World Financial Center, the southernmost tower. I guess that was World Financial Center three. So I would walk across the Westside Highway on this Land Bridge every day.”
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 used to joke that Wall Street should just pass its hat around to retire me Because then I just get out of everybody's bad news. But yeah, came back, was in the New York office for seven years, writing about economics. I was our markets editor during the credit bubble and the credit bust and learned a lot in that experience about the interactions of economics and finance.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To DC. Well, there was a stop in the middle in New York. So I was in Hong Kong for five years, moved back to the U.S. in early 2001, right in time for the tech bubble to burst. And of course, 9-11. Again, wherever I went, it seemed like terrible things were going on.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And free speech and all that have been slow and corrosive, and it's a different city today than it was 25 years ago. But after the handover, it was just people trying to make better lives for themselves.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I told my colleague, Kate Kelly, who was all over that story, I said, they're going to blow up this weekend. We need to have 2,000-word story ready to go Saturday. She's like, you're overreacting. I was like, watch, because I saw what happens when creditors of banks get nervous. And I learned all that in Asia. The other big event in Asia in the late 1990s was, of course, the handover, but for people in Hong Kong, it's a very entrepreneurial city. They were thinking, well, how do we get money? How do we make money off of this? You know, how do we tire, you know, the Chinese economy had been booming. It was a growth story. And so people were looking for ways to advance themselves economically. I think what we've seen happen to Hong Kong since, and this is perhaps a lesson, is that these attacks on democracy”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one of the formative experiences of my career in Hong Kong was covering the collapse of an investment bank called Peregrine Investments. And I saw why banks collapse and what causes these kinds of runs. It came in really handy 10 years later when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were blowing up. And I had insights that kind of got me ahead of those stories in ways that surprised some people at the journal. I don't know if you remember when those Bears hedge funds blew up.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Hong Kong. You know, I think it's been a very slow and corrosive process. And frankly, when I was there from 96 through 2000, it was really the economic events that were driving the city at the time. So the first one was the Asian financial crisis and a property crisis that swept through Asia. One of my formative experiences as a journalist was covering an investment bank called Peregrine Investments that blew up. And I learned some really important lessons that came back to help me in 2008 about how banks explode and were implode.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given what I was doing was a much bigger event than the handover. The handover had a long-term implications, obviously. But yeah, so I was there for all of it.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was there right for the handover. Oh, really? I mean, this is another great thing about journalism is wherever I went, it seemed like stuff started blowing up. So I started with the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong in July of 1997. That was the week that the UK handed the city over to China. And it was also the week that the Thai Bat devalued and started the Asian financial crisis. So I got in there and I was like flying from day one on these stories. It turned out that the Asian financial crisis, particularly”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there was no relationship except for the fact that the Knight family was really rich and could fund something like that. But Bloomberg was like up and coming at the time. And people weren't taking it as seriously as they should have. But I did that a few years, moved to Hong Kong with a newlywed with my newlywed on an exchange program with Colombia. And then I signed up with the journal over there.”
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 started out at a newswire service in the early 1990s. Here we are back in Bloomberg. It was called Night Ritter Financial Nation. Oh, sure. Yeah. Any relationship.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's really what ended up drawing it to me. I mean, the reporting aspect and the writing aspect, but just the idea of being like right in the middle of things as they're happening and trying to make sense of them and explain them was an addiction that I didn't get over for a long time.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem is And then it's like, why am I, you know, why am I learning to do literary reviews to kill a mocking brother? Anyway, I never thought I would have anything to do with writing. But then... I got involved in covering the local sports teams and I was like, this is really interesting. This is fun. I'm like right in the middle of the action. And like right on the sideline and people are paying attention and they care about it. And it just felt, it was just, I had fun and I've come to see over my career that like the great thing about journalism and like here we are on the Bloomberg newsroom is like you're always surfing right on the edge of history. Right.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, wow. I just, you know, so I hated English class in high school. I don't know how you felt, but they're still teaching it the same way, by the way, these four paragraph essays of introduction, supporting paragraph one, supporting paragraph.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few extra courses and get the NBA. But I was really there for the fellowship to kind of, basically what I wanted to do was learn how a balance sheet worked, learn how corporate finance worked. I had spent a bunch of years covering like macro, but I didn't understand anything about what made Wall Street go. So that was why I went back there.”
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 about five years into my journalism career, I went back and did a when I decided I wanted to do economics and finance, I went back and did a fellowship at Columbia. It was called a Night Badget Fellowship. Great program. And what they did is they took a few working journalists and they put them through the business school for a year. That's interesting. And then after a year of that, I decided to”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although Manhassa was a Catholic town. Yeah, it's very much so. Like their career plan for me was always journalism. I started writing for the Manhasset Press when I was 16 years old. I started out as a sports writer. The original plan was sports writer. And then the next plan was war correspondent. And then somehow I ended up becoming an economics writer. But I stuck to the plan of journalism.”
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 that many battles with editors at the Wall Street Journal over how to structure that story and what headline to put on it.”
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 should say on the Wall Street Journal, page one stories, it was here's I'm a former editor too. I had that many. I don't have that many anymore because I left the journal.”
2025-10-31 · Masters in Business · What Went Wrong in Great Financial Crisis Stimulus with Reporter Jon Hilsenrath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source