MRW - Podcast - George Melloan (guest) - May 24, 2017

Drew and Chris are joined by George Melloan.

George Melloan is a former editorial page deputy editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Encounter Books will publish his new book, “Free People Free Markets, How The Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages Shaped America” in July.

His latest previous book is titled “When the New Deal Came to Town, a Snapshot of a Place and Time With Lessons for Today,” published by Simon and Schuster’s Threshold Editions in November 2016. It details how the federal policy errors of first the Republicans and then the Democrats prolonged the Great Depression and how the people of a small farm village in Indiana coped with the resulting hard times.

In 2009, Simon & Schuster published his book titled “The Great Money Binge, Spending Our Way to Socialism,” which described how an easy money policy at the Fed created a credit bubble in the early 2000s. Combined with a government policy to stimulate home ownership, this led to unsound mortgage lending which caused distress once the credit bubble began to deflate and housing prices began to fall. These were the prime causes of the 2008 stock market crash and 2009 recession, he asserted.

A 1978 book, authored by Mr. Melloan and his wife Joan, was titled “The Carter Economy” and forecast the troubles that a combination of price controls and an inflationary monetary policy would cause for the Jimmy Carter administration and the nation at large. It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

During his 64-year at The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Melloan was a reporter in Chicago and Detroit, manager of the Cleveland and Atlanta news bureaus, a page one editor in New York, and a foreign correspondent based in London. Among other news events of the late 1960s, he covered the Six-Day war in Israel, the Biafran war in Nigeria and the unsuccessful efforts at economic reform in the Soviet Union.

Mr. Melloan joined the Journal editorial page in 1970 and was made deputy editor in 1973. In 1987 he launched the Journal’s Business World column. In 1990 he moved to Brussels to oversee the European and Asian editorial pages, starting a new column, titled Global View. Returning to New York in late 1994, he added coverage of the Americas to his international responsibilities. He retired in 2006, but has continued to contribute op-eds and book reviews to the Journal.

Mr. Melloan is a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations and the Dutch Treat Club in New York. He was winner of the Gerald Loeb award for distinguished business and financial journalism in 1981, the Daily Gleaner award of the Inter American Press Association twice in the 1980s for his writings about Soviet inroads in Latin America, and the American Spectator’s Barbara Olson award for excellence and independence in journalism in 2006. His home is in Westfield, N.J.