NEW YORK — The UCLA Anderson School of Management Tuesday evening presented Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism to reporters from the McClatchy Washington Bureau and The Miami Herald.
Washington Bureau reporters Greg Gordon, Kevin G. Hall and Chris Adams won the Loeb Award in the news service category for their reporting on Goldman Sachs, Moody's and the collapse of the American economy, which revealed how major Wall Street firms engaged in questionable practices that not only worsened the financial crisis but also may have conflicted with their own clients' interests. Adams, Gordon and Hall also were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their work.
Their stories included Gordon's five-month investigation of how blue-chip investment firm Goldman Sachs' sold securities tied to subprime mortgages at a time when it also was betting that those securities would plummet in value.
Adams' stories detailed how the Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly failed to get tough with major U.S. financial institutions that had violated securities laws.
Hall reported how Moody's Investors Service, the bond-rating agency, punished executives who questioned the company's bullish ratings on mortgage-backed securities and promoted those who authorized the ratings for the securities, which turned out to be junk.
Miami Herald reporters Michael Sallah, Rob Barry and Lucy Komisar won in the medium and small newspaper category for "Keys to the Kingdom: How State Regulators Enabled a $7 Billion Ponzi Scheme," which revealed how Florida officials helped disgraced financier Allen Stanford entice Latin Americans to pour millions of dollars into his ventures in secrecy and allowed Stanford to move money offshore without reporting a penny of it to regulators.
Reporters Rick Montgomery and Dan Margolies of The Kansas City Star were finalists in that category for "Enterprise Rent-A-Car Airbags," which reported how the nation's largest buyer of new cars and seller of used ones saved millions of dollars by deleting a standard safety feature, side-curtain airbags, from thousands of 2006-2008 Chevrolet Impalas.
McClatchy, based in Sacramento, Calif., owns 31 newspapers, including the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star.
The Loeb Awards were established in 1957 by the late Gerald Loeb to honor journalists who make significant contributions to the understanding of business, finance and the economy. He intended to encourage reporting on these subjects that would both inform and protect the private investor and the general public. The 2010 awards, judged by a panel of distinguished journalists and academics, were presented at a dinner at New York's Capitale restaurant.
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