David Wessel

David Wessel is the Washington-based global economics editor of The Wall Street Journal and writes the "Capital” column, a weekly look at the economy and forces shaping living standards around the world. He also appears frequently and National Public Radio.

David joined The Wall Street Journal in 1984 in Boston, and moved to Washington in 1987. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief.

He previously worked for the Boston Globe, the Hartford Courtant, and Middletown Press.   A 1975 graduate of Haverford College, he was Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81.

David has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Boston Globe stories in 1983 on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other for stories in The Wall Street Journal in 2002 on corporate wrong-doing.

He is the author of the best-selling 2009 book, "In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic," about the Federal Reserve’s response to the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. David also is the co-author, with Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis of  "Prosperity," a 1998 book on the American middle class.

He and his wife, Naomi Karp, senior policy advisor at AARP’s Public Policy Institute, have two children, Julia and Ben.