Eliot Janeway, born Eliot Jacobstein, was an American economist, journalist and author, widely quoted during his lifetime, whose career spanned seven decades.
24 Facts About Eliot Janeway
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Eliot Janeway was at times a vigorous critic of the economic policies of presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.
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Eliot Janeway's enduring pessimism about US economic prospects earned him the nickname "Calamity Janeway".
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Eliot Janeway majored in economics at Cornell University, eloped with classmate Caroline Rindsfoos with whom he travelled in 1933 to London following his mentor British political scientist George Catlin, and enrolling at the London School of Economics.
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Eliot Janeway briefly was a member of the British Communist Party.
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The marriage quickly foundered, he returned to England, she stayed on and kept his name, Carol Eliot Janeway, becoming in the 1940s a well-known ceramist in New York.
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Under the name Elizabeth Eliot Janeway, she became a noted novelist and essayist.
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Eliot Janeway's articles warned against selling arms to Japan long before the attack on Pearl Harbor and noted that US railroads needed renovation.
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Eliot Janeway's articles attracted interest in the Roosevelt administration and brought him some influence within its policy-making councils.
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Eliot Janeway believed that both were too practical to try to micro-manage a wartime mobilization, and that both realized that the mobilization could be confused at the top as long as it was overwhelming at the base.
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In 1955 Eliot Janeway started two weekly economic advisory newsletters that formed the heart of the Eliot Janeway Publishing and Research Corporation, a business he operated out of his five-story town house on East 80th Street in New York City.
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Eliot Janeway scored a number of forecasting firsts, among them higher interest rates that followed the escalation of the Vietnam War.
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Eliot Janeway became famous in the late 1960s for his dire forecasts of stock market trauma, which earned him the nickname "Calamity Janeway" on Wall Street.
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Eliot Janeway was among those who urged Johnson to run for the presidency in 1956 and was an active fundraiser for Johnson during the 1960 Democratic presidential primaries.
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Eliot Janeway appeared on TV talk shows and on lecture tours, reportedly receiving as much as five thousand dollars a speech.
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Eliot Janeway wrote eight books and articles for many publications that included Newsweek, Barron's, Commonweal and The New York Times.
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In 1989, Eliot Janeway published his final book, The Economics of Chaos.
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Eliot Janeway arrived at diverse reform strategies by a reconsideration of US economic history from Alexander Hamilton to Ronald Reagan.
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Eliot Janeway proposed swapping US food exports for oil imports, and demanded somewhat protectionist "reciprocity" in trade, whereby importers who penetrated more than 25 percent of a US domestic market would be required to invest in American assets or buy US products.
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Such improved benefits, Eliot Janeway argued, would coax millions of workers in the underground economy to pay their taxes in order to receive the better returns of government-sponsored programs.
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Eliot Janeway had other maverick proposals to halt the flight of workers and cash into the vast underground economy, which he called a three-ring circus consisting of growing numbers of people working off the books, the bustling Eurodollar market and the illegal drug trade.
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Eliot Janeway died on February 8,1993, at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan at age 80.
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Eliot Janeway did both of these things better and longer than most.
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In 1984, for instance, with a strong economic recovery in place that would continue for a number of years, Eliot Janeway asserted that the US economy was "jammed into stoppage" and expressed his usual bearish opinions on its future course.