About the Speakers
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.
Arnold was honored with a 2017 George Foster Peabody Award for his coverage of the Wells Fargo banking scandal. His stories sparked a Senate inquiry into the bank’s treatment of employees who tried to blow the whistle on the wrongdoing. Arnold also 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. For this series, Arnold won the 2016 Gerald Loeb Award which honors work that informs and protects the private investor and the general public. UCLA calls the award the most prestigious in financial journalism.
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 September 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.
David Swensen
Mr. Swensen manages the university’s more than $27 billion in Endowment assets and several hundreds of millions of dollars in other investment funds.
Under his stewardship during the past thirty-two years the Yale Endowment generated returns of 13.5 percent per annum, a record unequalled among institutional investors. He leads a staff of thirty-two. Prior to joining Yale in 1985, he spent six years on Wall Street, where his work focused on developing new financial technologies. He is the author of Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment and Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment. He teaches students in Yale College and in the School of Management, is a fellow of Berkeley College, an incorporator of the Elizabethan Club, and a fellow of the International Center for Finance. He has won numerous awards including: in 2012, the Yale Medal for outstanding individual service to the University; 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. In 2008 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2017 he joined the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Swensen has 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, the New York Stock Exchange, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Yale New Haven Hospital, the Investment Fund for Foundations, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Mr. Swensen holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University and received an honorary doctor of humane letters from Yale in 2014.