Kenneth Rapoza

Kenneth Rapoza is a seasoned, veteran business journalist with more than 20 years of experience reporting locally for The Boston Globe, and stationed abroad as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones News in Sao Paulo where he won awards for his work.

Since 2011, upon his return to the United States, Ken has covered trade, big business and investing in Brazil, Russia, India and China for Forbes and is considered to be one of the magazine’s most reliable experts on those countries. He has traveled throughout all of the countries he covers and has seen first hand China’s impressive growth and its ghost towns as recent as 2017.

His editorial work has appeared in diverse publications like USA Today — where he was given the unflattering task of taking an opposing view in support of China tariffs at the start of the trade war — and in liberal, advocacy media like In These Times.

All told, he has either written for, or has been written about, in The Nation and Salon in the dot-com years, and almost broke the Argentine internet after a story about the return of the International Monetary Fund before the government opened up about it.

Having grown up near the depressed mill towns of Massachusetts, manufacturing as a bulwark of household income and economic sustainability is not merely an intellectual pursuit, but a deeply personal one, as well. He experienced the life-altering impact government policy has on manufacturing labor in his own family back in the 1990s. He considers himself an American “lao baixing.” He graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH in his late 20s.

Ken now lives and works from a small farm and beach town in Southern Massachusetts with his family.