As Candidates Grapple with Economic Crisis, NewsTrust Users Seek Best Financial Reporting | Online NewsHour: Presidential, Senate and Gubernatorial Election Coverage: Vote 2008 | October 20, 2008 2:34 PM

Presidential Race

By Lee Banville on October 20, 2008

With polls showing the economy looming as the dominant issue on the minds of Americans this year, the NewsHour and NewsTrust have launched a joint effort to find and promote the most thorough reporting on the complex issues surrounding the financial crisis.

This “news hunt” will continue throughout the week of Oct. 20 at NewsTrust.net and will allow visitors to both submit articles and review other reports. The pieces that the NewsTrust community finds to be the most thorough and informative will appear on their site all week — and next week we will report on the results here at the Vote 2008 blog.

“Our News Hunts have helped tens of thousands of people become more discriminating news consumers this year — empowering them to make more informed decisions as citizens,” Fabrice Florin, NewsTrust founder and executive director, wrote. “By focusing on factual evidence and constructive dialog, we hope NewsTrust can bring Americans closer together — and broaden their perspective about journalism and democracy.”

You can find out more about the NewsHour and NewsTrust hunt for quality economic reporting here.

The most recent stories and reviews are also listed here:

Posted:
10/20/08 at
08:13 PM

Bill Starbuck : While mainstream news programs such as the Newshour have devoted hundreds of hours to describing the illness of Credit paralysis our economy is afflicted with no one is talking about what the CAUSE of this economic illness is. The cause is DEREGULATION as initiated by one Phil Gramm in the form of the Financial Services Modernization Act 1999, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act 2000(CFMA). The latter bill was added as a rider to the Omnibus Spending bill an 11,000 page must pass measure. The CFMA was introduced twice and could not pass as legislators were told by representatives of the Federal Reserve and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission that it would lead to speculation and manipulation of the futures markets. That's why Gramm had to add it as a rider to get it passed. These bills together enabled trading in Energy Futures without regulation or oversight (the ENRON Loophole) and the trading in Mortgage Backed securities and Credit Default Swaps. Trading in all these futures and financial derivative instruments were enabled without oversight by the government. These bills lead to the Enron debacle where-in Claifornians were defrauded of billions of dollars and the credit catastrophe we are now living through. People are anxious about this credit disaster because they do not understand how it happened. Knowing that it is deregulation of the trading in these contracts will at least inform them of how e got in the mess we now find ourselves in. It also will point to what must be done to make sure this doesn't happen again. We cannot let businesses and individuals trade in these futures and financial instruments without some controls being in place.