Bob Davis, of the Wall Street Journal
The planning and execution of a financial crisis takes a great deal of organization and money. You don't pull down an entire economic system overnight just by whistling for it. Bob Davis, of the Wall Street Journal, knows all about the care and feeding of an economic crisis, and has been covering them for the past twenty years with both relish and empathy.
Mr. Davis explains the origin of his singular feel for economic disaster: "My family has a history of dedication to bad investments and poor planning. It was a Davis who convinced the Ford Motor Company to invest so heavily in the Edsel; and a distant branch of the family back in Germany was granted a royal patent by Kaiser Wilhelm for a process that untwisted pretzels. It made them both paupers and pariahs overnight."
Wishing to honor the Davis family heritage Bob has often taken his own salary down to the racetrack for double parlays, and advanced seed money for cold fusion projects and parking lots in Antarctica. Unfortunately, a surprising number of his hunches have paid off handsomely -- leaving him to deal with an ever-growing embarrassment of riches.
Still, Mr. Davis does not allow his own financial security to cloud his judgment when it comes to reporting on the monetary peccadilloes of the Russians or Chinese. When a stock market melts down anywhere in the world, you can be sure that Bob Davis will be there to chronicle who's to blame and who actually pays the price -- usually two completely different sets of people. He roams the tawdry Beltway bogs and plunges into the stews of Georgetown to discover new species of flim flam.
At his hobby farm in rural Delaware Bob breeds soft shelled tacos which he then sells to herpetologists. He has the largest stand of giant bonsai in the Mid Atlantic region, and distills a heady liqueur from prickly pear leaves.
He has authored seventeen books, several of which are used as doorstops at the Library of Congress.
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