David Wessel is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, the mission of which is to improve the quality of fiscal and monetary policies and public understanding of them. He joined Brookings in 1974 after spent 30 years as a reporter, editor, and columnist at The Wall Street Journal.  He is a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, appears frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition and tweets often at @davidmwessel.

 

David is the author of two New York Times best-sellers: “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” (2009) and “Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget” (2012.)  He has edited other volumes including “Global Goliaths: Multinational Corporations in the 21st Century Economy” (2021) and  “The $13 Trillion Question: How America Manages Its Debt” (2015).  David has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1984 for a Boston Globe series on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other in 2003 for Wall Street Journal stories on corporate scandals.

 

He has taught in the Global Leadership program at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and at Princeton’s Ferris journalism program. David is a member of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Data Users Advisory Committee and of the advisory committee of The Sadie Collective. He also chairs the Administration Committee of Temple Sinai of Washington, D.C., and serves on the board of Sinai House, a transitional housing program.

 

A native of New Haven, Conn., and a product of its public schools, David is a 1975 graduate of Haverford College.  He was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81. David and his wife, Naomi Karp, who live in Washington, D.C., have two children, Julia and Ben.