Phil Roosevelt

Phil Roosevelt is the managing editor of Barron’s, the award-winning weekly financial magazine of Dow Jones. He is one of the most admired experts on investments, financial markets, banking and the economy, even while his reporting cuts against the grain of conventional wisdom.Roosevelt has nearly 30 years of experience in financial journalism. Barron’s reporting is in front of the major stories, such as being one of the first to raise questions about the investments of Bernard Madoff. The magazine now takes increasingly strong points of view on stocks, both bullish and bearish, and has greatly expanded coverage of wealth management and luxury lifestyle topics like travel, fashion and collecting. This has helped solidify Barron’s as one of the most trusted source of financial information in the world. Before joining Barron’s in 2003, Roosevelt served as editor in chief of American Banker newspaper and as a founding editor of a Time Inc. technology magazine.In 2008, several months before the housing market imploded, Roosevelt edited a cover story predicting that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could eventually require a big government bailout. When the article came out, the stocks of the two mortgage giants immediately plunged 12%. Bullish investors scrambled to discredit the story. But Roosevelt and Barron’s stuck to their guns. They followed up five months later, with a story laying out why a bailout was all but inevitable. The stocks again reacted violently, diving to 18-year lows. While bulls attacked once more, Barron’s was clearly on to something. Later, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would give kudos to that story in his autobiography, suggesting it helped clarify his own thinking on the need for a bailout. Four weeks after the story appeared, the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and pumped in $200 billion.Roosevelt is highly attuned to both the opportunities and the risks in modern finance. As a writer and editor, he has covered virtually every major financial debacle since the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s. That has helped keep Barron’s ahead of the pack in spotting danger, and it wrote presciently about trouble in the mortgage market before the financial crisis of 2008.