| Elizabeth MacDonald | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 2, 1962 Rockville Center, NY |
| Residence | New York |
| Education | Canisius College |
| Occupation | Journalist |
Elizabeth MacDonald (b. Jan. 2, 1962, Rockville Centre, NY) is a business journalist who appears on Fox Business and Fox News, and has been a guest commentator on other t.v. shows. MacDonald also covered the markets, corporate accounting scandals and the IRS for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine. MacDonald is now the stocks editor for the Fox Business Network, and has been a commentator on television and radio both in the United States and abroad, and according to her Fox bio has received more than a dozen journalism awards, including the Gerald Loeb award for excellence and the Society of Professional Journalists excellence in journalism award. MacDonald has covered business since 1988.
MacDonald is also a regular on the Fox News show Forbes on Fox, having been with the show since its inception in 2001. She appears daily and guest anchors Fox Business's TV shows throughout the trading day. Her column, EMac's Stock Watch, can be found on both the Fox Business and Fox News websites.
MacDonald has also appeared as a guest on CNBC's Kudlow & Company with Larry Kudlow, NBC's The Today Show, ABC's World News Tonight, ABC's Nightline, Your World with Neil Cavuto, The O'Reilly Factor, CBS This Morning, C-SPAN, Court TV, as well as radio shows such as ABC News talk radio and NPR.
MacDonald's primary beat is stock market corruption, corporate accounting abuses, the IRS and taxes. Members of the U.S. Congress have noted that an award-winning investigative series about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that MacDonald reported helped lead to broader taxpayer rights and reforms at the agency. It also led to Congress calling MacDonald in to testify about IRS abuses of taxpayers as well as IRS reforms.
MacDonald's scoops range from stories about the government's historic bailout of Wall Street, including the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Citigroup and Bank of America, executive bonus scandals and the abuse of taxpayer funds in Washington. MacDonald has also covered behind-the-scenes bailout controversies at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
MacDonald's IRS coverage included news on the Kennedys' secret IRS audits of its political enemies—including Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's group—to Scientology's secret deal with the IRS to become a world religion, to Congressional abuses of the IRS, and President George H.W. Bush's secret fight with the agency.
MacDonald also was one of the first journalists in the country to sound the alarm about the coming wave of corporate accounting scandals in the mid to late '90s while at the Wall Street Journal. And MacDonald created Forbes Magazine's top-rated annual feature, "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women," widely read around the world, in 2004.
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MacDonald has appeared on television with former presidential candidates, Congressmen and Senators, as well as notables such as Pat Buchanan, Ben Stein, Robert Reich, Art Laffer, Stephen Moore, Steve Forbes, energy expert Daniel Yergin, president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and Adam Posen, co-author with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Frederic Mishkin of a book about inflation-targeting.
Here are some excerpts from MacDonald's columns at EMac's Stock Watch on FoxBusiness.com:
"If a meteorite hit the planet, there would be three things left standing: Cockroaches, Cher, and Goldman Sachs."
"How to stop Congress's drunken fire brigade of deficit spending? Pay elected officials in Treasury bills. Make them eat their own cooking."
"Wall Street has gone berserk, the free market has turned into a free-for-all. And Washington's chaotic response to the bailouts is caroming around worse than the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team."
"I once asked a top Bear Stearns executive what was on his mind, as I allowed that overstatement, knowing that this was the firm that would securitize the effluent from a fire hydrant."
"Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan did little to rein in berserk bankers, as he defended himself to a mystified Congress in testimony that brought obscurantism to an art form, leaving some to wonder whether the central banker needs a GPS system on his logic."
"The markets remain in blackout mode for subprime bonds, as companies can't do mark to market accounting for them because there is no market to mark them to. This sounds like a bad Abbott and Costello movie."
"Another quarter horribilis is upon us. Fasten your wallets, this quarter's earnings are going to be a bumpy ride."
While at the Wall Street Journal, MacDonald delivered front-page stories, Heard on the Street columns, Economic Outlook columns, and broke news in the late '90s about the first wave of corporate accounting abuses, as well as scoops on corruption in the accounting industry.
MacDonald also delivered for The Wall Street Journal the story, based on Freedom of Information Act filings, about the Kennedy Administration's secret IRS program to audit its political enemies, a program that eventually resulted in the IRS audits of 10,000 right-wing groups under the auspices of tax-exempt code violations.[1]
MacDonald’s story reported that the IRS under the Kennedy administration audited Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And MacDonald's story reported that the Kennedys' IRS dragnet targeted for audits non-partisan groups, such as B'Nai Brith, the Daughters of Zion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, in a bid to not appear politically biased, according to the article's quotes from Kennedy's IRS commissioner Mortimer Caplin.
MacDonald also delivered the scoop for The Wall Street Journal on the secret details of the historic settlement between the Church of Scientology and the IRS that finally established the group as a world religion and gave Scientology nonprofit status, after a fight lasting nearly three decades.[2]
Prior to The Wall Street Journal, MacDonald was the financial editor for Worth and covered the IRS and taxes for Money.
At Money, MacDonald reported an award-winning investigative series on widespread abuses of taxpayers by the IRS, which members of the U.S. Congress have subsequently noted helped lead to improved taxpayer rights and reforms at the agency.[3]
MacDonald also delivered the scoop on the secret fight between President George H. W. Bush and the IRS over his state residency status (Bush said Maine, the IRS, Washington, D.C.). After the IRS ruled his residency was D.C., the former president rented a room at The Houstonian, a Houston, Texas hotel, calling it his primary residence[4]--a move that also helped garner Texas's electoral college votes.
MacDonald's story reported that the move let the president avoid Maine and District of Columbia taxes. MacDonald's story also provided grist for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign stump speeches and for editorials and political cartoons nationwide, including Doonesbury.
And MacDonald broke the news on Congress’s own personal IRS office on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress got the IRS's personal help in preparing their individual tax returns under the convoluted tax laws they write.[5]
MacDonald graduated with a B.A. with honors from Canisius College in 1984.