They knew the financial crisis was coming, but no one wanted to read about it.

A lack of interest among readers and editors combined with opaquely structured debt markets lay behind the media’s failure to warn the public of the oncoming financial crash, according to leading financial journalists speaking last night at LSE.

There were plenty of analyses, explanations and anecdotes offered by the journalists present and by the end, the audience had also been led to question whether it was, in fact,  the journalists’ role to predict events at all.

Alex Brummer, city editor of the Daily Mail claimed he heard about the potential problems posed for Fannie May and Freddie Mac with collateralized debt in 2002 and had drawn instant comparisons with Northern Rock. But any concerns he raised were only ever published in the Mail’s business section which is near the back of the paper. He seemed to think his words would have had more of an impact had they been allowed to resonate near the front of the paper which is read by about 8 million more pairs of eyes than the back.

Gillian Tett, assistant editor at the Financial Times, was franker in her admission they didn’t see it coming. But she was keen to point out that blame largely lay with the lack of interest in debt markets, which were seen as being overly complex and rather dull. She said she had personally tried to raise the paper’s coverage of the area, warning staff they were only covering a tiny area of the financial sector.  With such a fragmented structure in the world of debt markets, however, and an inbalance in the number of people who understood the area and the number of PRs working in bankers’ interests, gaining clarity, let alone foresight was a challenging task.

Some journalists say they knew a crisis was coming but it just wasn't front page news (Image taken from thehindubusinessline.com)

But amid the reminisces, LSE Professor, Willem Butler  raised the poignant issue of whether making such predictions was actually the role of journalists at all. Rather, he argued, it was the job of economists to provide the information and up to journalists to convey it to the country.

To an extent journalists need sources and when the sources are having a good time of things, they’re hardly going to blow the whistle on themselves. But it is vital that journalists strive to keep the country, including economists, informed about events so that people not in the game themselves are in a position to adequately scrutinse the implications.

Whatever our stance on whether we should or even could have seen the financial crisis coming,  the prevailing message of the evening was that people can only be in a position to react to circumstances efficiently if they are kept fully informed.

The question is perhaps simply: how can we make complex financial issues interesting enough to allow them the media prominence they have been proved to have deserved?

Listen to the podcast here: POLIS Event: Why Didn\’t They See the Financial Crisis Coming