Larry is CEO of Kudlow & Co. LLC, an economic and investment research firm. He hosts Kudlow & Company, a nightly TV series for CNBC. He’s also a contributing editor at National Review, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of American Abundance: The New Economic and Moral Prosperity. Larry attended the University of Rochester, and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His first job was as a junior economist at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

From the White House to CNBC

The mid to late ‘70s was a time of economic decline. I was the chief economist at Paine Webber, and I became very interested and very involved in the nascent supply-side movement to lower tax rates — to bring high marginal tax rates down in order to spur economic growth and cut inflation. I guess it was during that time period that, on my own, I started studying classical economists such as Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter, who, along with Milton Friedman, are my three loadstars. I became a sort of volunteer speechwriter for William Simon, the former treasury secretary. And Arthur Laffer and Jack Kemp taught me a lot about economics and political economics, respectively. So I sort of wound up in the Reagan orbit.

After Reagan won in a landslide, I met, quite by happenstance, David Stockman, who was appointed his budget director. I was asked to join the Reagan transition team to work on their new economic plan. They were going to start from scratch and throw out all of Carter’s stuff — which in those days was unprecedented. So I worked on that for about a month. And while I was there, I was offered the position of economics deputy at OMB. I was going to be a partner at Bear Stearns, so I had to turn down my partnership to take the job at OMB — and I did. So now I’m in the Reagan White House! And I did it for three years, and then came back to Wall Street as the Bear Stearns chief economist. So I essentially resumed my old position. I left Wall Street in the early 1990s and took a job as senior economics editor at National Review. In the mid-1990s, my broadcasting career started to take off. Now that I’m doing lkmp.blogspot.com Kudlow & Company on CNBC each night, I’ve essentially become a fulltime broadcaster.

A regular blog reader starts one of his own

bout two years ago, I started reading all of the new blogs that were developing, including Instapundit, Powerline, and Roger L. Simon. In 2004, I started up my own weblog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$. That thing’s been slowly but steadily growing. The weblog allows me to put short ideas into play as 100 to 300 word posts; they don’t always have to be 800- or 1,000-word articles like my syndicated columns. And it just allows me to do stuff quickly, whatever I think is worth blogging. It can be economics or politics, or whatever. And sometimes I blog on spiritual things: I’m a Catholic convert, and that’s a big part of my life — a very big part of my life. Faith enabled me to overcome my alcohol and drug abuse problems — I just had my tenth sober anniversary this past summer. So faith is a big part of my life, and sometimes I blog that.

Among the first TV hosts to feature bloggers

I think that blogging is a huge media force. And I think it’s also a huge political and cultural force. It really sets up enormously important alternatives to the mainstream media. In the coming years, the Blogosphere is going to become more and more important, and more and more powerful as an opinion-making media vehicle. On Kudlow & Company, we make frequent use of bloggers, and I refer to many of them in the normal course of the show. I was one of the earliest TV guys to put bloggers on; I felt that they had important and different kinds of thinking that needed exposure. And I’m glad to now see a growing group of economics bloggers, but I think that more can be done in that genre.

On our direction

I’m very honored to be invited onto the editorial board. Frankly, I think some of the others are much more important players than I am, and it’s very nice of them to ask me to come onboard. Cable TV is sort of the new broadcast medium, but cable needs to integrate more with the Blogosphere. And one of my goals as a broadcaster is to try to make that happen.