Brian Wesbury

Brian Wesbury is Chief Economist at First Trust Advisors L.P., a financial services firm based in Wheaton, Illinois. Wesbury also holds positions as a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and serves on the Board of Advisors to First Trust Capital Partners, an affiliated private-equity firm. He has been recognized as the #1 U.S. Economic Forecaster by the Wall Street Journal and is consistently listed among the top economics keynote speakers.

Wesbury is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and an adjunct professor of economics at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He also sits on the Board of Managers of Three-Sixty Advisory Group, a consulting and private-equity firm based in Pasadena, California. In 2012, he was named a Fellow of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, TX, contributing significantly to its 4%-Growth Project.

His career began in 1982 at the Harris Bank in Chicago. He has held significant roles such as Vice President and Economist for the Chicago Corporation and Senior Vice President and Chief Economist for Griffin, Kubik, Stephens, & Thompson. From 1995 to 1996, he served as Chief Economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. Wesbury earned an M.B.A. from Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Montana.

Wesbury has authored several books including "The New Era of Wealth," published by McGraw-Hill in October 1999, and more recently "It's Not As Bad As You Think," published in November 2009 by John Wiley & Sons. He writes regularly for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and serves as the Economics Editor of The American Spectator. In 2007, he was named a CNBC Contributor.

In 2011, Wesbury received the University of Montana's Distinguished Alumni Award, a recognition given to alumni who have notably honored the university, the state, or the nation. Among his 91,000 fellow graduates, he is one of only 267 recipients of this prestigious award. Additionally, his insights are frequently sought on major economic issues including inflation, recession, and government policy impacts on the economy, offering a deep understanding of the "Plow Horse Economy" and the influence of new technologies on economic growth.