What's New - Home - Login

Weisbrot earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. In 1999, he co-founded, together with economist Dean Baker, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), "to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives". Weisbrot is co-author, with Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 1999). In the book, Weisbrot and Baker argue that much of the United States Social Security debate has been based on misconceptions, that privatization would be unlikely to improve the system, and that the system in fact performs satisfactorily and does not need fixing.

Commenting on international matters, Weisbrot argues that globalization, as understood by the United States government and American lending institutions, has failed to live up to its promise of making poorer countries grow rich, stating that "no nation has ever pulled itself out of poverty under the conditions that Washington currently imposes on underdeveloped countries." He has criticized the role played by the IMF and has taken an active role in developing the Bank of the South, a joint project by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela spearheaded by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and designed to make South America financially less dependent on the IMF and World Bank. Weisbrot acted as a consultant to the governments concerned and has been described as the artífice intelectual, the intellectual architect, of the concept.

Weisbrot's work on Latin American countries (including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela) has attracted national and international attention, and in 2008 was cited by Brazilian Foreign Secretary Celso Amorim. In early 2010 Weisbrot's work on Latvia's economic crisis attracted national and international attention.

Weisbrot is also the President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy.

Weisbrot writes a column on economic and policy issues that is distributed across the United States by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. His work appeared in such publications as the The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times/International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and The Nation as well as news websites such as AlterNet, the Common Dreams NewsCenter and The Huffington Post. Internationally, Weisbrot writes a column for the UK's The Guardian, and for Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo. He has appeared on national and local television and radio programs, including CBS, the PBS Newshour, CNN, the BBC, National Public Radio and Fox News.

Weisbrot's commentaries on Latin American affairs have been broadly sympathetic to many governments in South America, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. In particular, Weisbrot has praised Latin American governments' attempts to assert stronger national control over key national resources, and to take a tougher stance in relation to foreign creditors. Weisbrot has also criticized some of these governments' policies.

In 2009, Weisbrot, alongside Tariq Ali, wrote the screenplay for the Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border which examined the rise of the democratic leftist movement across South America.

Co-authored with Dean Baker: