Zachary Karabell (born July 6, 1967) is the founder of the Progress Network at New America, president of River Twice Capital, an author, and a columnist. In 2003, the World Economic Forum designated him a "Global Leader for Tomorrow."
Karabell sits on the board of New America and PEN America. Previously, he was head of global strategies at Envestnet, a publicly traded financial services firm where he worked with the board and senior management on corporate strategy and with the investment committee on overall investment approaches for the firm. Prior to that, he was executive vice president, chief economist, and head of marketing at Fred Alger Management, a New York-based investment firm. He was also president of Fred Alger & Company, a broker-dealer and portfolio manager of the China-U.S. Growth Fund. At Alger, he oversaw the creation, launch and marketing of several funds, led strategy for strategic acquisitions, and represented the firm at public forums and in the media. In addition, he founded and ran the River Twice Fund from 2011-2013, an alternative investment fund which used sustainable business as its primary investment theme.
Karabell spent his adolescence attending private school in New York City, including The Collegiate School. [1] Karabell was educated at Columbia, Oxford and Harvard, where he received his Ph.D.. He has taught at several leading universities, including Harvard and Dartmouth, and has written widely on economics, investing, history and international relations.
His most recent book, Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power, was published by Penguin Press in May 2021. He is the author of eleven previous books, including The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World (Simon & Schuster, 2014); The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (which won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for best non-fiction book of the year in 2000); Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends On It (Simon & Schuster, 2009); and Sustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in the 21st Century, co-authored with Aron Cramer (Rodale 2010). His next book is a global history of corn.
As a commentator, Karabell is a regular columnist for Time and Contributing Editor for Politico, and the host of the podcast “What Could Go Right?” Previously he wrote “The Edgy Optimist” column for Slate, Reuters, and The Atlantic. He is a LinkedIn Influencer, and an occasional commentator on CNBC, Fox Business and MSNBC, and was a Contributing Editor for Wired and The Daily Beast. He also contributes to such publications as The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs.
Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin was a French social reformer, one of the founders of Saint-Simonianism. He was also a proponent of a Suez canal.
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, better known as Henri de Saint-Simon, was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.
Walter Trohan was a 20th-century American journalist, known as a long-time Chicago Tribune reporter (1929–1971) and its bureau chief in Washington, D.C. (1949–1968).
Containment was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. The name was loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire, which was containment of the Soviet Union in the interwar period.
Michael Richard Beschloss is an American historian specializing in the United States presidency. He is the author of nine books on the presidency.
Pocket Books is a division of Simon & Schuster that primarily publishes paperback books.
Walter Seff Isaacson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He has been the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Steven Brill is an American lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur who founded monthly magazine The American Lawyer and cable channel Court TV. He is the author of the best-selling book, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It.
William Joseph O'Neil was an American businessman, stockbroker and writer. He founded the stock brokerage firm William O'Neil & Co. Inc in 1963 and the business newspaper Investor's Business Daily in 1984. O'Neil was the author of the books How to Make Money in Stocks, 24 Essential Lessons for Investment Success and The Successful Investor among others, and is the creator of the CAN SLIM investment strategy.
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH) is the oldest and one of the largest private investment banks in the United States. In 1931, the merger of Brown Brothers & Co. and Harriman Brothers & Co. formed the current BBH.
Brown Bros. & Co. was an investment bank from 1818 until its merger with Harriman Brothers & Company in 1931, to form Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. According to Zachary Karabell:
In its first hundred years, the firm helped to make paper currency standard in the U.S., underwrote the earliest railroad and trans-Atlantic steamship companies and almost unilaterally created the first foreign exchange system between the American dollar and the British pound. In the 20th century, it became a cornerstone of what came to be known as “the Establishment,” as its partners entered the halls of government to shape the global economic and security system that remains the world’s institutional architecture.
Gar Alperovitz is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distinguished lecturer with the American Historical Society, co-founded the Democracy Collaborative and co-chairs its Next System Project with James Gustav Speth.
James C. "Jim" Collins is an American researcher, author, speaker and consultant focused on the subject of business management and company sustainability and growth.
Mark Victor Hansen is an American inspirational and motivational speaker, trainer and author. He is best known as the founder and co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series.
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made is a non-fiction book authored by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1986, it describes the actions of a group of U.S. federal government officials and members of the East Coast foreign policy establishment. Starting in the immediate post-World War II period, the group developed the containment policy of dealing with the Communist bloc during the Cold War. They also helped to craft institutions and initiatives such as NATO, the World Bank, and the Marshall Plan. An updated edition of the book was released in 2012.
Scott Burns is an American newspaper columnist and author who has covered personal finance and investments for over 30 years. He is known for creating the "Couch Potato Portfolio" investment strategy, which advocates the use of index funds over managed funds or stock-picking. In 2006, he co-founded the Web startup AssetBuilder, where he serves as chief investment strategist.
Penguin Random House LLC is an Anglo-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Group and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers.
Max Lincoln Schuster was an American book publisher and the co-founder of the publishing company Simon & Schuster. Schuster was instrumental in the creation of Pocket Books, and the mass paperback industry, along with Richard L. Simon, Robert F. DeGraff and Leon Shimkin. Schuster published many famous works of history and philosophy including the Story of Civilization series of books by Will Durant and Ariel Durant.
Elinor Steiner Gimbel was an American progressive leader and women's rights activist.
In 1948, Harry S. Truman and Alben W. Barkley were elected president and vice president of the United States, defeating Republican nominees Thomas E. Dewey and Earl Warren. Truman, a Democrat and vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, had ascended to the presidency upon Roosevelt's death in 1945. He announced his candidacy for election on March 8, 1948. Unchallenged by any major nominee in the Democratic primaries, he won almost all of them easily; however, many Democrats like James Roosevelt opposed his candidacy and urged former Chief of Staff of the United States Army Dwight D. Eisenhower to run instead.