Peter Morici is a busy man.
Aside from teaching courses on international business, he writes opinion columns for several major news sources, is a go-to economist for newspaper reporters and is a daily guest on news broadcasts around the world.
In one day last week alone, Morici said he completed interviews with an Irish radio station in Dublin, the Wall Street Journal Radio Network, KOMO and KIRO news radio stations in Seattle, AP Broadcast Radio and a German broadcast network – all before lunch, too.
“In a nutshell, I think I’m very good at breaking down economic issues. I’m very good at … taking economic subjects and making them understandable to everyday people,” Morici said. “I’m an economist that is not aligned with either the Democratic or the Republican [parties], so I think I do a pretty good job of explaining not only what the economic situations are, but the political constraints that keep us from getting into situations.”
It must be true, with the number of media outlets that rely on Morici daily to report on what many experts are calling the nation’s biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Morici said he works from home in order to handle all of the media inquiries and is able to complete his schoolwork between the interviews.
Carrie Handwerker, public relations associate for the business school, said Morici is a popular request from the media outlets that contact her office.
“He has a lot of opinions, and he’s very accessible,” she said.
Handwerker added that beyond Morici, many of the Smith school’s faculty are popular names in the news. Finance professors Albert “Pete” Kyle and Haluk Unal, for example, are scheduled to host a discussion in Washington next week to help journalists and Capitol Hill staffers dissect the crisis, she said.
Still, there’s no ignoring Morici’s popularity. As the former director of the Office of Economics at the U.S. International Trade Commission, Morici said he has always, to some extent, been in the eyes of the media.
“It ebbs and flows,” he said.
However, he is not always popular for his opinions, Morici said.
Though he said he thinks the government has taken some steps to tackle the crisis, more needs to be done before the economy is in the clear.
“A lot of the things the government has done are good things – that is, providing people with more liquidity,” he said. “But they also need to look at systemic reforms, and that is the way banks are reformed. The way banks manage themselves has led to some dysfunctionality in the market.
“The rescue package … has not adequately conditioned reform,” he added. “We’re not getting the help we need, and the crisis continues.”
Morici’s ability to translate his media savvy and broad range of economic experiences to the classroom makes him a popular professor, his students said.
“He’s very animated,” said Frank Washburn, a junior accounting and international business major. “He brings, I would say, more real-world experience into the classroom than most of my other teachers, because he talks about how he did Lou Dobbs [Tonight] half an hour ago before class, or about how he did CNN yesterday, or how he’s going to New York next week, so we won’t have class.
“Today he was joking about how he’ll be doing Lou Dobbs [Tonight] shows when he’s 90-years-old, and they’ll both be in wheelchairs,” Washburn added.
Lisa Nguyen, a junior marketing major, agreed that Morici’s strength comes from his ability to relay his experiences through lessons.
“We’re going through an economic crisis, and he’s actually speaking about the economic crisis on TV and the radio,” she said. “He relates that to certain topics in our class.”
But it can be strange to turn on CNN and see your professor, she said.
“Yesterday, I saw him on CNN, and it’s amazing because the recording that was being played on CNN, I actually saw him the day of when that thing was recorded,” she said.
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