DAVID WESSEL
Director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institute
David gives audiences a tailored economic outlook for the given industry and provides pathways to ensure prosperity into the future.
David Wessel is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institute, which provides independent, non-partisan analysis of fiscal and monetary policy issues in order to further public understanding and to improve the quality and effectiveness of those policies. He joined Brookings Institution in December 2013 after 30 years on the staff of The Wall Street Journal where, most recently, he was economics editor and wrote the weekly Capital column. 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 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.
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.
Learn more at www.davidwessel.net
Speech topics
The View from Washington: What Next?
A decade after the worst financial crisis in generations, the U.S. economy has recovered but the lingering effects of the crisis, the bailouts and the Great Recession on the economy and on American politics linker. David Wessel, the former economics editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of best-sellers, In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic and Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget, will take stock of the latest turns in the economy and the latest twists in policy, and look at where the White House, Congress and the Fed are likely to go next.
Books
Only the Rich Can Play: How a Billionaire Sold Washington a Bonanza for the Wealthy as a Way to Help the Poor
In a Winners Take All meets This Town narrative, a New York Times bestselling author tells the story of the creation of a massive tax break, in which political and economic elites attend to the care and feeding of the super-rich, and inequality compounds.
OCTOBER 2021
David Wessel's incredible tale of how Washington works-and why the rich keep getting richer-starts when a Silicon Valley entrepreneur concocts an idea that will save money on his taxes and spins it as a way to ostensibly help poor people. He organizes and pays for an effective lobbying effort that pushes his idea into law with little scrutiny or fine-tuning by congressional or Treasury tax experts-and few safeguards against abuse. With an unbeatable pair of high-profile sponsors, bumper-sticker simplicity and deft political marketing, the Opportunity Zone became an unnoticed part of the 2017 Trump tax bill. The gold rush followed immediately thereafter. David Wessel follows the money to see who profited from this plan that was supposed to spur development of blighted areas and help people out of poverty
The Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter, columnist, and bestselling author of In Fed We Trust, dissects the federal budget in this New York Times bestseller.
In Fed We Trust is a breathtaking and singularly perceptive look at a historic episode in American and global economic history