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 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 appears frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition and posts frequently on BlueSky at @davidmwessel.bsky.social
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). His most recent book is “Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age” (2021), the story of Opportunity Zones.
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. David is a member of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Data Users Advisory Committee. He also has taught in the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business Global 2030 executive education program and in the journalism program at Princeton University.
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. Episodes of David’s podcast, “Wessel’s Economic Update,” are available here.