Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson, United States, is head of investigations at the Guardian US. He previously served two stints as a senior editor at ICIJ, most recently from 2019 until September 2023, during which time he worked on the FinCEN Files, Pandora Papers, Uber Files and Trafficking Inc. investigations.

In his first tour at ICIJ from 2012 to 2017, he led ICIJ's World Bank investigation and worked as a reporter, writer and editor on ICIJ's Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers investigation. As global investigations editor at The Associated Press from 2017 to 2019, he edited the AP's investigation of war crimes and corruption in Yemen, which won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, and helped oversee the AP's coverage of the U.S. immigration crisis, which was honored with a Robert F. Kennedy Award and was a Pulitzer finalist for National Reporting. He previously worked as a reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, the Wall Street Journal and the Roanoke (Va.) Times and as investigative editor for Southern Exposure Magazine.

His work has also appeared in Forbes, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, and El País. His two decades of reporting on mortgage and banking fraud has prompted media observers to call him the reporter “who beat the world on subprime abuses,” the “guru of all things predatory lending” and the “Woodward/Bernstein of the mortgage crisis.” Columbia Journalism Review said: “You have to marvel at how a reporter can put this stuff together but the SEC/Department of Justice/FTC/FHA etc. can’t.” His reporting has won or shared many honors, including four Investigative Editors and Reporters Awards, four George Polk Awards, a John Hancock Award for business journalism and accolades from the National Press Club, the White House Correspondents’ Association, the American Bar Association, the New York Press Club and the New York State Society of CPAs. His series of stories for the Center for Public Integrity, "The Great Mortgage Cover-Up," won two awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and was selected to appear in Columbia University Press's Best Business Writing, 2012. Hudson was editor and lead author of Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits from Poverty (Common Courage Press, 1996), which won a Project Censored Award and Gustavus Myers Book Award. His most recent book, The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—and Spawned a Global Crisis (Times Books, 2010), was named Baltimore City Paper Book of the Year and was called “essential reading for anyone concerned with the mortgage crisis” by Library Journal.