Bloomberg Reporters Won't Be Making Nazi Comparisons Any Time Soon

You know who else sold faulty, complex interest-rate swaps to municipalities around the globe?

Hitler.

Not quite, says a new report concluding Bloomberg stepped over the line when it compared JP Morgan with the Nazis in a 2011 article.

In the piece, Bloomberg likened the damage done to an Italian town thanks to a bad JP Morgan deal with the town's Third Reich occupation six decades earlier.

"World War II’s Battle for Cassino leveled the Italian town and its hilltop abbey," the article began "Now, the 33,000 residents are digging out from the rubble left by Wall Street."

But the review — brought on by May's terminal snooping scandal — led Clark Hoyt, a Bloomberg News editor, to write this report obtained by the New York Times:

In one of the great campaigns of World War II, Monte Cassino was completely destroyed in a wave of battles that claimed 75,000 casualties and the lives of hundreds of townspeople. To suggest that a bond deal gone sour, curtailing daycare for 60 children and services for the poor, is comparable to the terror and cataclysm of war is inconsistent with BN’s high standards.

A separate review also shed light on how Bloomberg journalists were able to use users' terminal information to inform their articles (and lurk on trader chatrooms). Reporters no longer have access to that information, according to the report.

Bloomberg may have issued a mea culpa for the Nazi article, but the New York Times reported they have no plans to alter the original report.

Read the full report at the New York Times>