Mistargeted

 

Forbes has been taking something of a kicking recently, with people sharing the above image on LinkedIn and then declaring that the magazine is obviously incompetent to have featured people an institutions that turned out to be fraudulent, failures or both.

But Forbes is a financial magazine. Not a financial auditor, a financial regulator nor an enforcement body. They have no power to force businesses or individual to turn over their books for scrutiny or to pry into the exact mechanisms that a business might use to conduct day-to-day operations. For Forbes to have seen what was coming, it would have required a level of access that no magazine would ever be expected to have, and that none of Forbes' critics would want the media to have into their own affairs.

True, there are some warning signs that it's reasonable to suggest that a savvy media organization could have found; FTX's lack of internal governance procedures, or Silicon Valley Bank's high exposure to duration risk and uninsured deposits. But a lot of other organizations, like auditors and regulators could, and maybe should, have known about them, too. After all, they have ways of ensuring much deeper access to the inner workings of an organization than a magazine does.