The DOJ’s Gift to Wall Street
The Department of Justice failed to build criminal cases for financial-crisis misdeeds. Now it’s settling with banks without even filing civil suits.
Dean Starkman is a fellow at Center for Media, Data and Society and a visiting lecturer at the School of Public Policy at the Central European University, Budapest. He is the author of The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2014), an acclaimed analysis of business-press failures prior to the 2008 financial crisis, and is a frequent speaker on the present and future of news. Previously, he ran the Columbia Journalism Review’s business section, “The Audit,” a web-based provider of media criticism, reporting and analysis. Most recently, he was the Wall Street correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reporting on the intersection of finance and society from New York. His work on finance and media has also appeared in the New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones, and Washington Monthly, among other publications. An investigative reporter for more than two decades, Starkman covered white-collar crime and real estate for The Wall Street Journal and helped lead the Providence Journal’s investigative team to a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Last updated July 2017
The Department of Justice failed to build criminal cases for financial-crisis misdeeds. Now it’s settling with banks without even filing civil suits.
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