David Wessel, the economics editor for The Wall Street Journal, has resigned to accept a job with the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington.
Wessel will be a senior fellow and oversee the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. He will still contribute to the Journal.
In a note to the Journal staff, managing editor Gerard Baker wrote, “His contributions to the Journal’s economics coverage have been peerless. I am deeply grateful to him for all he has done over 30 years in journalism, I wish him all the very best in his new venture and I look forward to enjoying the fruits of future collaboration between us.”
Wessel currently writes the Capital column, a weekly look at the economy and forces shaping living standards around the world. He also appears frequently on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and on WETA’s “Washington Week.”
“I’ve been a daily journalist since the day after I graduated from college in 1975, and I’m finishing my 30th year at The Wall Street Journal,” said Wessel in a statement. “It’s time to try something new.”
He is the author, most recently, of “Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget” (2012). He wrote the New York Times best-seller “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” (2009) and, with Bob Davis, “Prosperity” (1998), a look at the American middle class.
Previously, Wessel was deputy bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau. He joined the 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 has worked for the Boston Globe, the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press. A product of the New Haven, Conn, public schools, he graduated from Haverford College in 1975 and was a Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters by Eureka College.
Wessel 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.
