Eliot Janeway

[5] The marriage quickly foundered, he returned to England, she stayed on and kept his name, Carol Janeway, becoming in the 1940s a well-known ceramist in New York.

Janeway's writing career began at 24, when he wrote a series of articles for The Nation magazine predicting the 1937-38 recession and proposing a massive program of government investment in transportation and power equipment to cure it.

Janeway's articles also warned against selling arms to Japan long before the attack on Pearl Harbor and noted that U.S. railroads needed renovation.

His Struggle for Survival discussed how World War II and its full employment boom had transformed economics from a dismal science into the means for dynamic possibilities.

He also became famous in the late 1960s for his dire forecasts of stock market trauma, which earned him the nickname "Calamity Janeway" on Wall Street.

To some extent he anticipated the credit crunch of the mid-1980s, which resulted in the savings and loan industry's troubles throughout farm country.

Janeway appeared on TV talk shows and on lecture tours, reportedly receiving as much as five thousand dollars a speech.

Janeway arrived at diverse reform strategies by a reconsideration of U.S. economic history from Alexander Hamilton to Ronald Reagan.

[11] In The Economics of Chaos Janeway urged the United States Treasury Department to invest Social Security and other government trust funds more aggressively to generate greater benefits.

Such improved benefits, Janeway argued, would coax millions of workers in the underground economy to pay their taxes in order to receive the better returns of government-sponsored programs.

Janeway had other maverick proposals to halt the flight of workers and cash into the vast underground economy, which he called a three-ring circus consisting of growing numbers of people working off the books, the bustling Eurodollar market and the illegal drug trade.

[10] In the 2004 book The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power From FDR to LBJ, Janeway's son Michael recounted his father's place in history.

In reviewing this book for The New York Times, the historian Michael Beschloss concluded: "What Eliot Janeway excelled at was keeping himself in the limelight and latching onto people who were going places.

He did both of these things better and longer than most...During the 1970s and 80s, when men like (Abe) Fortas and (Felix) Cohen had faded into the past, the high-flying Janeway was starring in television commercials for Mazda and Glenfiddich Scotch and slipping economic ideas to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

In 1984, for instance, with a strong economic recovery in place that would continue for a number of years, Janeway asserted that the U.S. economy was "jammed into stoppage" and expressed his usual bearish opinions on its future course.