David Wessel

David Meyer Wessel (born February 21, 1954) is an American journalist and writer who has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. He is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 30 years. Wessel appears frequently on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

Wessel is a native of New Haven, Connecticut. He is the son of Morris A. Wessel, a pediatrician, and Irmgard R. Wessel, a clinical social worker. Wessel graduated from New Haven’s Richard C. Lee High School in 1971 and from Haverford College in 1975, where he majored in economics. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters by Eureka College.

Wessel began his reporting career at the Middletown, Connecticut Press in 1975 and joined the staff of the Hartford Courant in 1977. He left Hartford in 1980 to spend a year as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He moved to The Boston Globe in 1981 and was hired in 1983 as a reporter in the Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau. He transferred to the Washington, D.C. bureau in 1987 and worked there for the duration of his time at the WSJ, except for a brief period as the paper's Berlin bureau chief in 1999-2000.