[6] He joined Bloomberg News in 1997, where he wrote about finance, private equity, mergers and acquisitions, energy markets, politics and economics.
Mark didn't see much difference between selling AAA-rated bonds backed by subprime mortgages and sending e-mails claiming to be African royalty in need of help transferring a fortune to a U.S. bank, and he was amused by the financial industry's pretensions that they were making a great contribution to our economy.In summer 2007, Pittman wrote stories predicting the collapse of the banking system.
[8] His article "S&P, Moody’s Hide Rising Risk on $200 Billion of Mortgage Bonds" was excoriated by Portfolio.com in an unsigned post, which was later reversed in a signed apology.
"[12] In 2008, he was part of the team that won a Gerald Loeb Award in the News Service category for a five-part series called "Wall Street's Faustian Bargain.
[1] Pittman broke a number of major financial stories, including that of how Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and others gained from the bailout of AIG.
[12] He also broke the story about former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's involvement in creating the subprime mortgage crisis when he was CEO of Goldman Sachs.
[12] Around September – October 2008, as the financial meltdown was taking place, Pittman and his Bloomberg colleagues, including Bob Ivry, were covering the bailout story as it was happening and they started wondering what they could do to show the big picture.
[14] They discovered the amount going to prop up the financial system dwarfed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
[14] He filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request[14] to gain records about taxpayer-financed policies that were being withheld from the public,[1] to wit, where the Fed had lent 2 trillion taxpayer dollars and what it was getting in return.
[18] In September 2009, after the initial ruling in Bloomberg's favor, the Clearing House Association, LLC, a group of 20 of the largest commercial banks, joined the lawsuit.
[1] It begins with a dissection of bank deregulation, largely by Pittman, and continues with a "thriller-like exposition" of the precarious financial boom built on new homeowners, often minorities, who were charged hidden escrow costs in documents they didn't understand.