Naked Capitalism

Naked Capitalism is a liberal American group blog focused on the financial sector. Susan Webber, the principal of Aurora Advisors Incorporated, a management-consulting firm based in New York City, launched the site in late 2006, using the pen name Yves Smith. She focused on finance and economic news and analysis, with an emphasis on legal and ethical issues of the banking industry and the mortgage foreclosure process, the worldwide effects of the banking crisis of 2008, the 2007–2012 global financial crisis, and its aftermath. The site became one of the most highly frequented financial blogs on the Internet and has published a number of noted exposés since. Webber graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. She began her career in the financial services industry in 1981 at Goldman Sachs, later moving to McKinsey & Co. and Sumitomo Bank. In 1989 she founded her own company. Webber started the Naked Capitalism blog because she saw a reporting gap in 2006, just before the financial crisis – there was a lot of anxiety among seasoned observers, yet the US press featured "all this cheerleading [of the financial industry] and there was a lack of any skepticism [...] How could anyone in the market not see what was going on? That we were going to have some sort of train wreck?" Webber has also written under her pen name – a pun on the 18th-century economist Adam Smith – for other outlets including the New York Times, New York magazine, Bloomberg, and the Roosevelt Institute. Naked Capitalism is written by a small group of contributors. In addition to Webber herself, current and former contributors include: Lambert Strether Conor Gallagher Philip Pilkington David Dayen Michael Hudson Matt Stoller Nathan Tankus Jerri-Lynn Scofield Andrew Dittmer Edward Harrison Richard Smith (UK editor) Naked Capitalism became widely read during the 2007–2008 financial crisis as people were trying to come to grips with what was happening. This led to TV appearances for Smith on stations such as CNBC, CNN, Fox News and PBS, and she was approached to write a book on the crisis.