“I can’t find one check on the financial system that succeeded,” said David Wessel, the economics editor of The Wall Street Journal. Not the rating agencies, not the vaunted risk management programs. “I think we failed, too,” he added, looking around the auditorium.
Wessel spoke Wednesday night to a roomful of fellow business journalists who had been invited to the Journal‘s offices in midtown Manhattan to hear him talk about the book he published last year: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic. He had much to say about the Federal Reserve and Chairman Bernanke, who was confirmed last week for a second term. But he also expounded at length on the state of business journalism.
