More than four years after the 2008 financial crisis, public trust in banks is as low as ever. Sophisticated investors describe big banks as “black boxes” that may still be concealing enormous risks— the sort that could again take down the economy. Jesse Eisinger's investigation, written with Frank Partnoy, is called  “What’s Inside America’s Banks” and appears in the January/February issue of The Atlantic.

 

 

ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger looks at the early days of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Mitt Romney ran in the early 1990s. The firm’s work in turning around Staples is well known, but Bain was also sued several times for buying companies and selling them for a profit, without paying a finder’s fee.

On today’s Backstory, ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger talks about what’s inside a jobs bill-- The Jump-Start Our Business Act --that just passed in the House of Representatives. We’ll also look at how the Federal Reserve has dealt with the country’s largest financial firms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein, who were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for “The Wall Street Money Machine,” talk about the series, which examined how some hedge funds and banks worsened the financial crisis while making a hefty profit for themselves.  It’s ProPublica’s second Pulitzer in only its third year of publishing investigations, and it’s the first Pulitzer to be awarded to a group of stories that were never published in print.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is in Jackson Hole, Wyoming today at the annual meeting of economists and central bankers. Bernanke will address the group with a speech entitled “Reflections on a Year of Crisis.” We speak with Jesse Eisinger, a senior reporter at ProPublica, asking him to provide his own reflections on Bernanke's actions during this economic "year of crisis."

The AIG bonus scandal stirred intense anger from the public, the media and the president. Swiss bank Credit Suisse has adopted a creative solution to the bonus paying problem — pay part of employees bonuses in "toxic assets," those repackaged bad loans that are at the center of our economic downturn. Jesse Eisinger, a financial writer who has worked at the Wall Street Journal and Condé Nast Portfolio, explains.

Click through for a transcript.

Find out what credit derivatives really are, and how they’ve affected Wall Street during the current financial crisis. Jesse Eisinger is senior writer and Wall Street columnist for Conde Nast, and author of "The $58 Trillion in the Room" for Portfolio magazine.