James Mark Pittman was a financial journalist covering corporate finance and derivative markets.
15 Facts About Mark Pittman
1.
2.
Mark Pittman was awarded several prestigious journalism awards, the Gerald Loeb Award, the George Polk Award, a New York Press Club award, the Hillman Prize and several New York Associated Press awards.
3.
Mark Pittman has a daughter, Maggie, from his first marriage.
4.
Mark Pittman met his second wife, Laura Fahrenthold of Rochester, New York, a journalist, in 1994.
5.
Mark Pittman had a reputation there for being intimidating, relentless, funny and brilliant.
6.
Mark Pittman joined Bloomberg News in 1997, where he wrote about finance, private equity, mergers and acquisitions, energy markets, politics and economics.
7.
In summer 2007, Mark Pittman wrote stories predicting the collapse of the banking system.
8.
Mark Pittman said that his early experience dealing with police gave him a "big BS detector" because he was lied to so much by the police, the victims, and those helping the victims.
9.
Mark Pittman had to sort through all the lies to get to the real story, which was different from the one he was being told.
10.
Mark 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.
11.
Mark Pittman 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.
Mark Pittman decided he wanted to find out who was borrowing from the Federal Reserve, how much they were borrowing and what kind of collateral the Fed was getting in return.
13.
Mark Pittman filed a Freedom of Information Act request to gain records about taxpayer-financed policies that were being withheld from the public, to wit, where the Fed had lent 2 trillion taxpayer dollars and what it was getting in return.
14.
Mark Pittman's efforts drew the attention of Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, who then featured him prominently in their documentary about the collapse of the subprime market.
15.
The title of the unnarrated film, American Casino, comes from something Mark Pittman says in the beginning of the film.