David Jules Enrich is an American author, reporter and editor and an accomplished French horn player. He is currently financial editor at The New York Times based in New York and was previously financial enterprise editor at The Wall Street Journal.
Career
Enrich worked as an intern at The Nationin the Summer of 2000 and at U.S. News & World Report in 2001. Enrich received his bachelor's degree in 2001 from Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. While in college, Enrich co-founded claremontmckenna.com, the first online newspaper at the five Claremont Colleges. He also founded and directed Citizens for True Democracy, a Southern California grassroots organization that proposes replacing the Electoral College with direct voting. Enrich joined the Journal in December 2007 in New York as a reporter writing about the U.S. banking industry, with a particular focus on Citigroup. Prior to joining the Journal, he was a reporter with Dow Jones Newswires for several years. Before that he was a reporter for States News Service in Washington, D.C. He served as a Washington correspondent covering Congress, the White House and federal regulatory agencies for several regional newspapers including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Philadelphia Daily News. Enrich has received numerous journalism awards, including in 2012 an Overseas Press Club award for coverage of the European debt crisis, a George Polk Award for coverage of insider trading, two SABEW awards and a Gerald Loeb Award for feature writing for “The Unraveling of Tom Hayes.” Enrich was also part of teams of Journal reporters who were finalists for Pulitzer Prizes in 2009 and 2011. On October 17, 2013, a British judge ordered Enrich and The Wall Street Journal to comply with a request by the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office prohibiting the newspaper from publishing names of individuals in the government's ongoing investigation into the Libor scandal. Enrich was threatened with jail if he disobeyed. The situation was covered in the press as an example of the restrictions the media face in the U.K. from courts that impose reporting restrictions to prevent journalists from reporting details that prosecutors believe could jeopardize an investigation or case and by celebrities keen to cover up indiscretions. Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Journal, described the injunction as "serious affront to press freedom." On October 21, an English judge said he wouldn't renew the court order saying there was "no basis" for the reporting restrictions. In 2016, Enrich returned to New York from London, where he had been European banking editor for The Wall Street Journal, in order to lead a financial-enterprise team tasked with writing in depth on markets, money flows and other aspects of Wall Street. His book, The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History, was published in March 2017 to critical acclaim. National Review called The Spider Network "a nonfiction epic...an engrossing, entertaining tale." Bloomberg Businessweek called it an "exhaustively reported tale" and author Harlan Coben praised it as a "terrific nonfiction book." The New York Times called it a "vivid depiction of the ethos of the core financial institutions upon which the global economy depends." CNBC and the FT recommended the book as one of their summer reads. It was also shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. In August 2017, The New York Times announced that they had hired Enrich.
Dark Towers
In May 2019, Enrich reported on how anti-money laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank had flagged suspicious transactions involving Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. Enrich accepted a request from a producer at MSNBC to appear on The Rachel Maddow Show the following night, Vanity Fair reported. But the New York Times pulled Enrich from the show amid concerns about cable-news “bias.” The episode revealed how New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet feels that if a Times reporter were to go on an opinionated cable-news show, his or her appearance could be perceived as being aligned with that show’s political leanings. Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction came out on February 18, 2020. Harper Collins, its publisher, described the work as a "never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality." Author John Carreyrou said that the work is "darkly fascinating and yet all too real, it’s a tale that will keep you up at night.
