Michael A. Whitehouse

Michael A. Whitehouse writes on economics, education and societal issues and lives in the beach town of Lewes, Delaware. He currently is the executive producer of a course being developed by several universities titled: “The Baby Boomers and Millennials: Rewriting the Rules of Retirement” Afforded the blessings often bestowed on a liberal arts major, Michael has had the opportunity to learn and work in many fields and thus has had a varied and creative career - embracing eclectic assignments in public affairs, education, marketing and fund raising for causes easy to believe in. Michael honed his writing skills early while doing his graduate work in journalism at Penn State, (where he editor of the Liberal Arts Review and was both a columnist for "The Daily Collegian" and founder of the university alternative newspaper, "The Turning Point"). He then started his career in Washington DC at Georgetown University and then moved to the Federal Reserve Board where he learned about money and economics and was researcher and speech writer and ultimately became acting historian. He published a number of articles and essays on banking history and wrote profiles on some of the historic figures who helped this country recover from the great early money panics and the Great Depression. In the 1990s Michael held various senior positions at the NASDAQ Stock Market and became director of media relations for NASDAQ in its West Coast office in Silicon Valley. Along the way, having forged relationships with universities such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Yale, Harvard and GW, he created - and along with those academic partners - co-produced a series of seminars, symposiums and conferences on what were then "future- looking" topics ranging from the convergence of biotech and info-tech to the emergence of the age of digital health - to the future of electronic and digital payments. In 2014 Michael worked as producer and writer for GW University - helping create the first-of-its-kind Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the Federal Reserve and the nation’s banking system, which received national recognition and coverage in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal. He also published an in-depth review in Bloomberg's Banking Report BNA on the Evolution of the Federal Reserve System on the occasion of the central bank's Centennial Anniversary. Michael's current interests are broad ranging but the projects have a common theme of examining existing societal paradigms and either challenging those models or embracing and improving them. Ongoing work includes: a project with Harvard's Divinity School on "Food, Spirituality and Radical Abundance;" an initiative with GW University and others on the nation's aging population and the lack of financial preparedness, and how education and policy reforms can help address this serious problem; and a project exploring the existing myopic short-term investment culture and how the world's equity markets are due for disruption.