About Chris Arnold
NPR correspondent Chris Arnold is based in Boston. His reports are heard regularly on NPR’s award-winning newsmagazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. He joined NPR in 1996, and was based in San Francisco before moving to Boston in 2001.
Most recently, Arnold has been reporting on financial challenges facing millions of working and middle class Americans as the economy continues to recover from the worst recession in generations. He won the National Association of Consumer Advocates award for Investigative Journalism for a series of stories he reported with ProPublica that exposed improper debt collection practices by non-profit hospitals who were suing thousands of their low-income patients.
Arnold is now serving as the lead reporter and editor for the ongoing NPR series “Your Money and Your Life” which explores personal finance issues. As part of that, he’s reporting on the problem of Wall Street firms charging excessive fees in retirement accounts: fees that siphon billions of dollars annually from Americans trying to save for the future.
Following the 2008 financial crisis and collapse of the housing market, Arnold reported on problems within the nation’s largest banks that led to the banks improperly foreclosing on thousands of American homeowners. For this work, Arnold earned a 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award for the special series, The Foreclosure Nightmare. He’s also been honored with the Newspaper Guild’s 2009 Heywood Broun Award for broadcast journalism. And he was a finalist for the Scripps Howard Foundation’s National Journalism Award.
Arnold was chosen for a Nieman Journalism Fellowship at Harvard University during the 2012-2013 academic year. He joined a small group of other journalists from the U.S. and abroad and studied economics, leadership, and the future of journalism in the digital age. Arnold also teaches Radio Journalism as a Lecturer at Yale University. And he was named a Poynter Fellow by Yale in 2016.
Over his career at NPR, Arnold has covered a range of other subjects – from Katrina recovery in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, to immigrant workers in the fishing industry, to a new kind of table saw that won’t cut your fingers off. He traveled to Turin, Italy, for NPR’s coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics. He has also followed the dramatic rise in the numbers of teenagers abusing the powerful and highly addictive painkiller Oxycontin.
In the days and months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Arnold reported from New York and contributed to the NPR coverage that won the Overseas Press Club and the George Foster Peabody Awards. He chronicled the recovery effort at Ground Zero, focusing on members of the Port Authority Police department, as they struggled with the deaths of 37 officers - the greatest loss of any police department in U.S. history.
Prior to his move to Boston, Arnold traveled the country for NPR doing feature stories on entrepreneurship. His pieces covered technologists, farmers, and family business owners. He also reported on efforts to kindle entrepreneurship in economically disadvantaged areas ranging from inner-city Los Angeles to the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota.
Arnold has worked in public radio since 1993. Before joining NPR, he was a freelance reporter working out of San Francisco’s NPR Member Station, KQED.
About David Swensen
David Swensen, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer, oversees $25 billion in Endowment assets and several hundreds of millions of dollars of other investment funds. Under his stewardship during the past 30 years the Yale Endowment generated returns of 13.9 percent per annum, a record unequalled among institutional investors. Mr. Swensen leads a staff of 30, located near the University’s campus in downtown New Haven.
Prior to joining Yale in 1985, Mr. Swensen spent six years on Wall Street – three years at Lehman Brothers and three years at Salomon Brothers – where his work focused on developing new financial technologies. At Salomon Brothers, he structured the first swap, a currency transaction involving IBM and the World Bank. Mr. Swensen authored Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment and Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment, both published by The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. His books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Mr. Swensen won numerous awards, including: in 2015, The George H.W. Bush Lifetime of Leadership Award, in 2014, an honorary degree from Yale, Doctor of Humane Letters; in 2012, the Yale Medal for outstanding individual service to the University; in 2008, a fellowship in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; in 2007, the Mory’s Cup for conspicuous service to Yale; in 2007, the Hopkins Medal for commitment, devotion and loyalty to Hopkins School; and in 2004, the Inaugural Institutional Investor Award for Excellence in Investment Management. At Yale, where he teaches a popular economics seminar in Yale College, he is a Fellow of Berkeley College, an Incorporator of the Elizabethan Club, and a Fellow of the International Center for Finance.
In 2013, Yale named the Berkeley College Master’s Residence “Swensen House” in his honor. In 2014, Hopkins School named the Head of School’s Residence “Swensen House.” At Yale, the head coach of women’s tennis is the Swensen-McMahon Coach and member of the Economics Department faculty holds the David F. Swensen Chair in Economics.
Mr. Swensen advised the President of the United States as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He served as trustee or advisor to the Brookings Institution, Cambridge University, the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Hopkins School, TIAA, Major League Baseball, the New York Stock Exchange, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Yale New Haven Hospital, the Investment Fund for Foundations, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts.