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About two years ago, we began hearing from New York Times readers whose banks were mysteriously closing their checking and savings accounts, and sometimes the accounts of their family members, too. It was as if the accounts had become tainted, and the banks refused to tell them why.
We began to investigate. We asked readers to share their experiences, and our inboxes were flooded with responses. Our reporting eventually turned into a series, Shuttered Accounts.
Among the 1,500 readers who wrote to us, several shared situations that raised new and confounding questions. One reader named Mike told us about a truly baffling situation: His bank seemed to have misplaced nearly $2 million of his money.
This wasn’t the first time we had seen notes from readers that had made us want to both scratch our heads and shout to the heavens. In fact, it reinforced an idea for a new feature that we’d been thinking about for a while, one in which we would try to help readers understand how something seemingly inexplicable happened to their money.
How Did This Happen?, a new monthly column, was born.
The three of us got together to talk about getting the series off the ground.
Ron Lieber: So this all started with a $1,869,000 check that was left on the sidewalk in Manhattan in front of a guy named Mike’s apartment building. Our own Mike (known internally as Coach Mike for his learned advice to fellow runners) could hardly believe it, so he reached out to the other Mike.
