Journalist Mark Pittman who foresaw the subprime mortgage crisis and fought to open the Fed to scrutiny died November 25. Cause of death is not yet known; Pittman suffered from heart-related illness, reports Pittman’s employer, Bloomberg News.

Pittman’s reporting led to Bloomberg News suing the Fed to affirm

the public’s right to know about the central bank’s more than $2 trillion in loans to financial firms.

Pittman was profiled in Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s film American Casino; the documentary takes its name from a phrase the journalist coined about subprime mortgage lending. It was Pittman who had written, Cassandra-like, a number stories in predicting the collapse of the banking system. In the “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain” series, he

explained how 5 percent of U.S. mortgage borrowers missing monthly payments could lead to a freeze in lending throughout the world.

He won the 2007 Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in financial journalism, for the  “Faustian Bargain” series.

Pittman strongly believed that citizen and lawmakers should understand how the financial system worked and why the financial crisis happened to in order the better affect public policy.

Hopefully, we will be able to inform the people enough to know how badly we’re getting screwed. We need to know how to prevent it from happening again, and we need to know who did it.

Bloomberg filed lawsuit against the Fed after Pittman’s requests under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act were denied. The lawsuit now continues without him. While the central bank won a delay pending an appeal, which is scheduled for the week of Jan. 4.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke says:

congressional proposals to audit the Fed and strip it of regulatory powers as part of post-crisis reforms could damage prospects for economic recovery and financial stability going forward.

Reuters says Bernanke wrote in a column posted on the Washington Post’s website:

These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States.