Doug Henwood: Difference between revisions

Douglas Henwood (born December 7, 1952) is an American journalist, economic analyst, and financial trader who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective, co-owner and co-editor, along with Phillipa Dunne, of The Liscio Report, an independent newsletter focusing on macroeconomic analysis, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.

Henwood was born to Harold and Victorine Henwood in Teaneck, New Jersey and grew up in Westwood, New Jersey. He received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1975. As a youth Henwood was familiarized with Marxism but for a period late in high school into his early years at Yale, he identified as a conservative, briefly joining the Party of the Right:^[1]

Sometime late in high school, I fell under the spell of Milton Friedman and Bill Buckley, and about the first thing I did when I got to college was join the Party of the Right (POR).

After college Henwood worked as secretary to the chairperson of a small Wall Street brokerage firm headed by a former Bell Labs physicist and which used quantitative analysis techniques in the mid-1970s predating their later flood of adoption on the Street.^[2]

From 1976-1979, Henwood did graduate work in English at the University of Virginia, concentrating on British and American poetry and on critical theory but he left before obtaining his doctorate. He then worked for two years as a copywriter and assistant to a medical publisher in New York.^[3]

In September 1986, Henwood launched Left Business Observer (LBO) (ISSN 1042-0134).^[4] Topics to which he has devoted coverage include:

• Income distribution and poverty in the U.S. and elsewhere in the First World
• the globalization of finance and production
• the worldwide attack on pensions
• Third World debt and development
• the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank
• the media business
• the influence of foundations on politics and culture
• what it means to be a leftist in a world that seems to have forgotten what that means

In 1992, Henwood worked with John Liscio on The Liscio Report on the Economy, a financial advisory agency that publishes proprietary research. The newsletter is widely followed in the investment community. In 2000, after Liscio's death, Henwood and Phillipa Dunne, a business partner, inherited The Liscio Report and continue to publish the newsletter using the research techniques pioneered by their mentor.^[5]

Henwood has written three books. His first, The State of the USA Atlas (1994), is a social atlas of the U.S. in the Pluto atlas series. This was followed in 1997 by Wall Street (Verso Books), in which Henwood described the workings of high finance. His most recent work is After the New Economy (New Press, 2003), an analysis of the 1990s boom and bust. Another book is intended covering the American ruling class.

His writing has also appeared in The Nation, Grand Street, Village Voice, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian (UK). He is a contributor editor at The Nation.^[6] He has been been quoted or cited in a range of media including The Asia Times, The New York Times, and The Times of London.

Henwood began hosting Behind the News in 1996, a weekly radio show and podcast produced at KPFA and, formerly, WBAI. Henwood previously was a regular contributor to Samori Marksman's show, starting in 1989. Behind the News features interviews with activists, intellectuals and academics, preceded by a summary of recent economic headlines.^[7] Notable former guests include Noam Chomsky, James K. Galbraith, Christopher Hitchens, Lewis Lapham, George McGovern, Joseph Stiglitz, Gore Vidal, and Slavoj Žižek.^[8]

On November 11, 2010, Henwood announced that he would be retiring Behind the News in its current form, instead broadcasting from another venue as well as on his website. This change arose from an interim producer's decision to reschedule Henwood's show to Saturdays and reduce its airtime to twice a month despite Henwood's having raised substantial funds during the network's previous fund drive, conditions that the host found unacceptable.^[9]

He is married to journalist Liza Featherstone. They live in Brooklyn with their young son.

Henwood authored three books and is working on a forth.^[10]

• State of the U.S.A. Atlas (1994), ISBN 978-0-671-79696-9
• Wall Street (1997), ISBN 0-86091-670-7
• After the New Economy (2003), ISBN 1-56584-770-9

• Twitter account
• Left Business Observer
• LBO News (blog)
• Free downloadable version of Wall Street
• "Unconventional Wisdom: An Interview with Doug Henwood" by Bhaskar Sunkara (The Activist, 21 February 2010)
• "Ka-Pow! Bang! Crash! Down Goes Another Bubble!: Doug Henwood in Conversation with Christian Parenti", The Brooklyn Rail, (July-August 2009)
• "Economic Unorthodoxy: An Interview with Doug Henwood" (24 April 2004)
• "The 'New Economy' and the Speculative Bubble: An Interview with Doug Henwood" (Monthly Review, April 2001)
• "The Marxist Wall Street Couldn't Ignore", by Annalee Newitz, Salon.com, December 1998
• The Liscio Report on the Economy by Doug Henwood and Phillipa Dunne (blog)

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