Featured Speaker NBC's Mike Jensen

Former NBC Chief Financial Correspondent Mike Jensen kicked off the 2007 Livingston Economic Club Luncheon Series, Monday, Feb. 12 at the Genoa Woods Conference Center in Brighton, Mich.

Mike Jensen, Former Chief Financial Correspondent for NBC

Named "Best Economic and Business Correspondent in America" by TV Guide, Mike Jensen is an intrepid analyst who relentlessly deciphers the financial stories shaping today's market. In his 40 years as a journalist for NBC Nightly News, the Today Show and The New York Times, he has covered every major economic event of our times, reporting from the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, the trading rooms of Wall Street and Alan Greenspan’s inner sanctum at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C.

Jensen was in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, in China after Tiananmen Square exploded in violence and in Russia and Poland when Communism fell. In the U.S., he reported on the energy crisis of the 1970s, the stock market boom and crash of the 1980s, corporate downsizing in the 1990s and the Internet revolution in the new millennium.

He anchored The Jensen Report, a program on personal finance on the NBC Radio Network and has interviewed, one-on-one everyone from Bill Clinton and Lech Walesa to Mick Jagger and a Zimbabwe medicine man. As an author, his non-fiction book The Financiers examined the great Wall Street investment banking houses. He lectures on the economy and the vagaries of covering it on TV.

Along the way, Jensen earned a host of prestigious awards: a national news Emmy for his coverage of floods in the Midwest, first place in the news-documentary category at the San Francisco International Film Festival for Labor in the Promised Land, three Gabriel Awards for Today reports that promoted “positive human values,” and two Janus Awards for “excellence in broadcast journalism concerning economic issues.” He also received a Media Award for Economic Understanding for an NBC Nightly News special segment “Killer Inflation,” as well as prizes from the Overseas Press Club and the Deadline Club of New York for his reporting at The New York Times.

Jensen was born in Chicago and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Harvard University, where he studied English Literature and Economics; he spent three years in the U.S. Navy as a destroyer officer, then earned a Master’s Degree at Boston University where he was named a Distinguished Alumnus. He enjoys boating, and plays both golf and the banjo (badly).

He and his wife, the former Jane Rice Woodruff, have a daughter who is a television producer and a son who is a sports reporter.