What makes the market go up, what makes it go down, and reporting on that movement-we learned that in real time. The WSJ could have been called Wall Street Journal University, where one was lucky to be admitted. One reason I was attracted to the Wall Street Journal in the day, was it did pursue inquiry. What do you think of financial journalism today? A lot of our readers think these publications are overly credulous about markets and the Fed.ĪS: I don’t know about today. Over the years you’ve written for Forbes, Financial Times, Bloomberg, and on the editorial board for the Wall Street Journal. JD: After Yale you made your way into financial journalism. Did you consider yourself a conservative at the time?ĪS: No, I considered myself someone interested in history and in English, German, and French. I thought I should play to my comparative advantage and my comparative advantage at the time was in the humanities. Did you imagine a career in writing and history?ĪS: When I was at Yale I said, I’ll give journalism five years and if it doesn’t work out I’ll go to law school. In all my work, the goal is to impart knowledge about the past. Do you consider yourself an historian, journalist, biographer? How do you describe your work?ĪMITY SHLAES: A historian. JEFF DEIST: Let’s start by letting readers know a little bit more about you. She has authored six books, including three New York Times bestsellers, on Calvin Coolidge, the New Deal, and the Great Society. She much appreciates Mises’s emphasis on property and bureaucracy, both of which influence her work. Amity Shlaes is chairman of the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, she is a classical liberal, and she knows economics.

Amity shlaes coolidge foundation