title: Romanian language

text: Pierre Lescalopier writes in 1574 that those who live in Moldavia, Wallachia and the vast part of Transylvania, "consider themselves as true descendants of the Romans and call their language romanechte, which is Roman".


title: Romanian language

text: After travelling through Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania Ferrante Capecci accounts in 1575 that the vallachian population of these regions call themselves ().


title: Romanian language

text: In (17th century), the Moldavian chronicler Grigore Ureche wrote: "In Transylvania there live not only Hungarians, but also very many Saxons, and Romanians everywhere around, so much so that the country is inhabited more by Romanians than by Hungarians."


title: Romanian language

text: Miron Costin, in his (1687), while noting that Moldavians, Wallachians, and the Romanians living in the Kingdom of Hungary have the same origin, says that although people of Moldavia call themselves "Moldavians", they name their language "Romanian" () instead of "Moldavian" ().


title: Romanian language

text: The Transylvanian Hungarian Martin Szentiványi in 1699 quotes the following: ("We too are Romanians") and ("We are of Romanian blood"). Notably, Szentiványi used Italian-based spellings to try to write the Romanian words.


title: Romanian language

text: Dimitrie Cantemir, in his (Berlin, 1714), points out that the inhabitants of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania spoke the same language. He notes, however, some differences in accent and vocabulary.


title: Romanian language

text: Cantemir's work provides one of the earliest histories of the language, in which he notes, like Ureche before him, the evolution from Latin and notices the Greek and Polish borrowings. Additionally, he introduces the idea that some words must have had Dacian roots. Cantemir also notes that while the idea of a Latin origin of the language was prevalent in his time, other scholars considered it to have derived from Italian.


title: Romanian language

text: The slow process of Romanian establishing itself as an official language, used in the public sphere, in literature and ecclesiastically, began in the late 15th century and ended in the early decades of the 18th century, by which time Romanian had begun to be regularly used by the Church. The oldest Romanian texts of a literary nature are religious manuscripts (, ), translations of essential Christian texts. These are considered either propagandistic results of confessional rivalries, for instance between Lutheranism and Calvinism, or as initiatives by Romanian monks stationed at Peri Monastery in Maramureș to distance themselves from the influence of the Mukacheve eparchy in Ukraine.


title: Romanian language

text: The Modern age of Romanian language starts in 1780 with the printing in Viena of a very important grammar book titled "Elementa linguae daco-romanae sive valachicae". The author of the book, Samuil Micu Klein, and the revisor, Gheorghe Șincai, both members of the Transylvanian School, chose to use Latin as the language of the text and presented the phonetical and grammatical features of Romanian in comparison to its ancestor. The Modern age of Romanian language can be further divided into three phases: pre-modern or modernizing between 1780 and 1830, modern phase between 1831 and 1880, and contemporary from 1880 onwards.


title: Romanian language

text: Beginning with the printing in 1780 of "Elementa linguae daco-romanae sive valachicae", the pre-modern phase was characterized by the publishing of school textbooks, appearance of first normative works in Romanian, numerous translations, and the beginning of a conscious stage of Romanization or Re-Romanization of the language. Notable contributions, besides that of the Transylvanian School, are the activities of Gheorghe Lazăr, founder of the first Romanian school, and Ion Heliade Rădulescu. The end of this period is marked by the first printing of magazines and newspapers in Romanian, in particular Curierul Românesc and Albina Românească.


title: Romanian language

text: Starting from 1831 and lasting until 1880 the modern phase is characterized by the development of literary styles: scientific, administrative, and belletristic. It quickly reached a high point with the printing of Dacia literară, a journal founded by Mihail Kogalniceanu and representing a literary society, which together with other publications like and spread the ideas of Romantic Nationalism and later contributed to the formation of other societies that took part in the 1848 Revolutions. Their members and those that shared their views are collectively known in Romania as – literally meaning "of '48" – a name that was extended to the literature and writers around this time such as V. Alecsandri, Gr. Alexandrescu, N. Bălcescu, Timotei Cipariu.


title: Romanian language

text: Between 1830 and 1860 a "transitional alphabet" was used, adding Latin letters to the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet. In 1860 the Latin alphabet became official.


title: Romanian language

text: Following the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia further studies on the language were made, culminating with the founding of on 1 April 1866 on the initiative of C. A. Rosetti, an academic society that had the purpose of standardizing the orthography, formalizing the grammar and (via a dictionary) vocabulary of the language, and promoting literary and scientific publications. This institution later became the Romanian Academy.


title: Romanian language

text: The third phase of the Modern age of Romanian language, starting from 1880 and continuing to this day, is characterized by the prevalence of the supradialectal form of the language, standardized with the express contribution of the school system and Romanian Academy, bringing a close to the process of literary language modernization and development of literary styles. It is distinguished by the activity of Romanian literature classics in its early decades: Mihai Eminescu, Ion Luca Caragiale, Ion Creangă.


title: Romanian language

text: The current orthography, with minor reforms to this day and using Latin letters, was fully implemented in 1881, regulated by the Romanian Academy on a fundamentally phonological principle, with few morpho-syntactic exceptions.


title: Romanian language

text: Following the annexation of Bessarabia by Russia (after 1812), Moldavian was established as an official language in the governmental institutions of Bessarabia, used along with Russian,


title: Romanian language

text: The publishing works established by Archbishop Gavril Bănulescu-Bodoni were able to produce books and liturgical works in Moldavian between 1815 and 1820.


title: Romanian language

text: Bessarabia during the 1812–1918 era witnessed the gradual development of bilingualism. Russian continued to develop as the official language of privilege, whereas Romanian remained the principal vernacular.


title: Romanian language

text: The period from 1905 to 1917 was one of increasing linguistic conflict, with the re-awakening of Romanian national consciousness. In 1905 and 1906, the Bessarabian asked for the re-introduction of Romanian in schools as a "compulsory language", and the "liberty to teach in the mother language (Romanian language)". At the same time, Romanian-language newspapers and journals began to appear, such as (1906), (1907), (1907), (1908), (1913), (1913). From 1913, the synod permitted that "the churches in Bessarabia use the Romanian language". Romanian finally became the official language with the Constitution of 1923.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian has preserved a part of the Latin declension, but whereas Latin had six cases, from a morphological viewpoint, Romanian has only three: the nominative/accusative, genitive/dative, and marginally the vocative. Romanian nouns also preserve the neuter gender, although instead of functioning as a separate gender with its own forms in adjectives, the Romanian neuter became a mixture of masculine and feminine. The verb morphology of Romanian has shown the same move towards a compound perfect and future tense as the other Romance languages. Compared with the other Romance languages, during its evolution, Romanian simplified the original Latin tense system.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is spoken mostly in Central and the Balkan region of Southern Europe, although speakers of the language can be found all over the world, mostly due to emigration of Romanian nationals and the return of immigrants to Romania back to their original countries. Romanian speakers account for 0.5% of the world's population, and 4% of the Romance-speaking population of the world.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is the single official and national language in Romania and Moldova, although it shares the official status at regional level with other languages in the Moldovan autonomies of Gagauzia and Transnistria. Romanian is also an official language of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia along with five other languages. Romanian minorities are encountered in Serbia (Timok Valley), Ukraine (Chernivtsi and Odessa oblasts), and Hungary (Gyula). Large immigrant communities are found in Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal.


title: Romanian language

text: In 1995, the largest Romanian-speaking community in the Middle East was found in Israel, where Romanian was spoken by 5% of the population. Romanian is also spoken as a second language by people from Arabic-speaking countries who have studied in Romania. It is estimated that almost half a million Middle Eastern Arabs studied in Romania during the 1980s. Small Romanian-speaking communities are to be found in Kazakhstan and Russia. Romanian is also spoken within communities of Romanian and Moldovan immigrants in the United States, Canada and Australia, although they do not make up a large homogeneous community statewide.


title: Romanian language

text: According to the Constitution of Romania of 1991, as revised in 2003, Romanian is the official language of the Republic.


title: Romanian language

text: Romania mandates the use of Romanian in official government publications, public education and legal contracts. Advertisements as well as other public messages must bear a translation of foreign words, while trade signs and logos shall be written predominantly in Romanian.


title: Romanian language

text: The Romanian Language Institute (Institutul Limbii Române), established by the Ministry of Education of Romania, promotes Romanian and supports people willing to study the language, working together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department for Romanians Abroad.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is the official language of the Republic of Moldova. The 1991 Declaration of Independence names the official language Romanian. The Constitution of Moldova names the state language of the country Moldovan. In December 2013, a decision of the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled that the Declaration of Independence takes precedence over the Constitution and the state language should be called Romanian.


title: Romanian language

text: Scholars agree that Moldovan and Romanian are the same language, with the glottonym "Moldovan" used in certain political contexts. It has been the sole official language since the adoption of the Law on State Language of the Moldavian SSR in 1989. This law mandates the use of Moldovan in all the political, economic, cultural and social spheres, as well as asserting the existence of a "linguistic Moldo-Romanian identity". It is also used in schools, mass media, education and in the colloquial speech and writing. Outside the political arena the language is most often called "Romanian". In the breakaway territory of Transnistria, it is co-official with Ukrainian and Russian.


title: Romanian language

text: In the 2014 census, out of the 2,804,801 people living in Moldova, 24% (652,394) stated Romanian as their most common language, whereas 56% stated Moldovan. While in the urban centers speakers are split evenly between the two names (with the capital Chișinău showing a strong preference for the name "Romanian", i.e. 3:2), in the countryside hardly a quarter of Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated Romanian as their native language. Unofficial results of this census first showed a stronger preference for the name Romanian, however the initial reports were later dismissed by the Institute for Statistics, which led to speculations in the media regarding the forgery of the census results.


title: Romanian language

text: The Constitution of the Republic of Serbia determines that in the regions of the Republic of Serbia inhabited by national minorities, their own languages and scripts shall be officially used as well, in the manner established by law.


title: Romanian language

text: The Statute of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina determines that, together with the Serbian language and the Cyrillic script, and the Latin script as stipulated by the law, the Croat, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Rusyn languages and their scripts, as well as languages and scripts of other nationalities, shall simultaneously be officially used in the work of the bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, in the manner established by the law. The bodies of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina are: the Assembly, the Executive Council and the provincial administrative bodies.


title: Romanian language

text: The Romanian language and script are officially used in eight municipalities: Alibunar, Bela Crkva (), Žitište (Zitiște), Zrenjanin (Zrenianin), Kovačica (Kovăcița), Kovin (Cuvin), Plandište (Plandiște) and Sečanj. In the municipality of Vršac (Vârșeț), Romanian is official only in the villages of Vojvodinci (Voivodinț), Markovac (Marcovăț), Straža (Straja), Mali Žam (Jamu Mic), Malo Središte (Srediștea Mică), Mesić (Mesici), Jablanka, Sočica (Sălcița), Ritiševo (Râtișor), Orešac (Oreșaț) and Kuštilj (Coștei).


title: Romanian language

text: In the 2002 Census, the last carried out in Serbia, 1.5% of Vojvodinians stated Romanian as their native language.


title: Romanian language

text: In parts of Ukraine where Romanians constitute a significant share of the local population (districts in Chernivtsi, Odessa and Zakarpattia oblasts) Romanian is taught in schools as a primary language and there are Romanian-language newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting.


title: Romanian language

text: The University of Chernivtsi in western Ukraine trains teachers for Romanian schools in the fields of Romanian philology, mathematics and physics.


title: Romanian language

text: In Hertsa Raion of Ukraine as well as in other villages of Chernivtsi Oblast and Zakarpattia Oblast, Romanian has been declared a "regional language" alongside Ukrainian as per the 2012 legislation on languages in Ukraine.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations, such as the Latin Union and the European Union. Romanian is also one of the five languages in which religious services are performed in the autonomous monastic state of Mount Athos, spoken in the monastic communities of Prodromos and Lakkoskiti. In the unrecognised state of Transnistria, Moldovan is one of the official languages. However, unlike all other dialects of Romanian, this variety of Moldovan is written in Cyrillic script.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is taught in some areas that have Romanian minority communities, such as Vojvodina in Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Hungary. The Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) has since 1992 organised summer courses in Romanian for language teachers. There are also non-Romanians who study Romanian as a foreign language, for example the Nicolae Bălcescu High-school in Gyula, Hungary.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is taught as a foreign language in tertiary institutions, mostly in European countries such as Germany, France and Italy, and the Netherlands, as well as in the United States. Overall, it is taught as a foreign language in 43 countries around the world.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian has become popular in other countries through movies and songs performed in the Romanian language. Examples of Romanian acts that had a great success in non-Romanophone countries are the bands O-Zone (with their No. 1 single "Dragostea Din Tei"/"Numa Numa" across the world in 2003–2004), Akcent (popular in the Netherlands, Poland and other European countries), Activ (successful in some Eastern European countries), DJ Project (popular as clubbing music) SunStroke Project (known by viral video "Epic sax guy") and Alexandra Stan (worldwide no.1 hit with "Mr. Saxobeat") and Inna as well as high-rated movies like "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days", "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu", "" or "California Dreamin'" (all of them with awards at the Cannes Film Festival).


title: Romanian language

text: Also some artists wrote songs dedicated to the Romanian language. The multi-platinum pop trio O-Zone (originally from Moldova) released a song called ("I won't forsake our language"). The final verse of this song, , is translated in English as "I won't forsake our language, our Romanian language". Also, the Moldovan musicians Doina and Ion Aldea Teodorovici performed a song called "The Romanian language".


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is also called Daco-Romanian in comparative linguistics to distinguish from the other dialects of Common Romanian: Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. The origin of the term "Daco-Romanian" can be traced back to the first printed book of Romanian grammar in 1780, by Samuil Micu and Gheorghe Șincai. There, the Romanian dialect spoken north of the Danube is called to emphasize its origin and its area of use, which includes the former Roman province of Dacia, although it is spoken also south of the Danube, in Dobruja, the Timok Valley and northern Bulgaria.


title: Romanian language

text: This article deals with the Romanian (i.e. Daco-Romanian) language, and thus only its dialectal variations are discussed here. The differences between the regional varieties are small, limited to regular phonetic changes, few grammar aspects, and lexical particularities. There is a single written and spoken standard (literary) Romanian language used by all speakers, regardless of region. Like most natural languages, Romanian dialects are part of a dialect continuum. The dialects of Romanian are also referred to as 'sub-dialects' and are distinguished primarily by phonetic differences. Romanians themselves speak of the differences as 'accents' or 'speeches' (in Romanian: or ).


title: Romanian language

text: Depending on the criteria used for classifying these dialects, fewer or more are found, ranging from 2 to 20, although the most widespread approaches give a number of five dialects. These are grouped into two main types, southern and northern, further divided as follows:


title: Romanian language

text: Over the last century, however, regional accents have been weakened due to mass communication and greater mobility.


title: Romanian language

text: Some argots and speech forms have also arisen from the Romanian language. Examples are the Gumuțeasca, spoken in Mărgău, and the Totoiana, an inverted "version" of Romanian spoken in Totoi.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is a Romance language, belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, having much in common with languages such as Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese.


title: Romanian language

text: Compared with the other Romance languages, the closest relative of Romanian is Italian. Romanian has had a greater share of foreign influence than some other Romance languages such as Italian in terms of vocabulary and other aspects. A study conducted by Mario Pei in 1949 which analyzed the degree of differentiation of languages from their parental language (in the case of Romance languages to Latin comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation) produced the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin):


title: Romanian language

text: The lexical similarity of Romanian with Italian has been estimated at 77%, followed by French at 75%, Sardinian 74%, Catalan 73%, Portuguese and Rhaeto-Romance 72%, Spanish 71%.


title: Romanian language

text: The Romanian vocabulary became predominantly influenced by French and, to a lesser extent, Italian in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


title: Romanian language

text: While most of Romanian grammar and morphology are based on Latin, there are some features that are shared only with other languages of the Balkans and not found in other Romance languages. The shared features of Romanian and the other languages of the Balkan language area (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, Greek, and Serbo-Croatian) include a suffixed definite article, the syncretism of genitive and dative case and the formation of the future and the alternation of infinitive with subjunctive constructions. According to a well-established scholarly theory, most Balkanisms could be traced back to the development of the Balkan Romance languages; these features were adopted by other languages due to language shift.


title: Romanian language

text: Slavic influence on Romanian is especially noticeable in its vocabulary, with words of Slavic origin constituting about 10–15% of modern Romanian lexicon, and with further influences in its phonetics, morphology and syntax. The greater part of its Slavic vocabulary comes from Old Church Slavonic, which was the official written language of Wallachia and Moldavia from the 14th to the 18th century (although not understood by most people), as well as the liturgical language of the Romanian Orthodox Church. As a result, much Romanian vocabulary dealing with religion, ritual, and hierarchy is Slavic. The number of high-frequency Slavic-derived words is also believed to indicate contact or cohabitation with South Slavic tribes from around the 6th century, though it is disputed where this took place (see Origin of the Romanians). Words borrowed in this way tend to be more vernacular (compare "sfârși", "to end", with "săvârși", "to commit"). The extent of this borrowing is such that some scholars once mistakenly viewed Romanian as a Slavic language. It has also been argued that Slavic borrowing was a key factor in the development of ("î" and "â") as a separate phoneme.


title: Romanian language

text: Even before the 19th century, Romanian came in contact with several other languages. Notable examples of lexical borrowings include:


title: Romanian language

text: Furthermore, during the Habsburg and, later on, Austrian rule of Banat, Transylvania, and Bukovina, a large number of words were borrowed from Austrian High German, in particular in fields such as the military, administration, social welfare, economy, etc. Subsequently, German terms have been taken out of science and technics, like: "șină" < "Schiene" "rail", "știft" < "Stift" "peg", "liță" < "Litze" "braid", "șindrilă" < "Schindel" "shingle", "ștanță" < "Stanze" "punch", "șaibă" < "Scheibe" "washer", "ștangă" < "Stange" "crossbar", "țiglă" < "Ziegel" "tile", "șmirghel" < "Schmirgelpapier" "emery paper";


title: Romanian language

text: Since the 19th century, many literary or learned words were borrowed from the other Romance languages, especially from French and Italian (for example: "birou" "desk, office", "avion" "airplane", "exploata" "exploit"). It was estimated that about 38% of words in Romanian are of French and/or Italian origin (in many cases both languages); and adding this to Romanian's native stock, about 75%–85% of Romanian words can be traced to Latin. The use of these Romanianized French and Italian learned loans has tended to increase at the expense of Slavic loanwords, many of which have become rare or fallen out of use. As second or third languages, French and Italian themselves are better known in Romania than in Romania's neighbors. Along with the switch to the Latin alphabet in Moldova, the re-latinization of the vocabulary has tended to reinforce the Latin character of the language.


title: Romanian language

text: In the process of lexical modernization, much of the native Latin stock have acquired doublets from other Romance languages, thus forming a further and more modern and literary lexical layer. Typically, the native word is a noun and the learned loan is an adjective. Some examples of doublets:


title: Romanian language

text: In the 20th century, an increasing number of English words have been borrowed (such as: "gem" < jam; "interviu" < interview; "meci" < match; "manager" < manager; "fotbal" < football; "sandviș" < sandwich; "bișniță" < business; "chec" < cake; "veceu" < WC; "tramvai" < tramway). These words are assigned grammatical gender in Romanian and handled according to Romanian rules; thus "the manager" is "managerul". Some borrowings, for example in the computer field, appear to have awkward (perhaps contrived and ludicrous) 'Romanisation,' such as "cookie-uri" which is the plural of the Internet term "cookie."


title: Romanian language

text: A statistical analysis sorting Romanian words by etymological source carried out by Macrea (1961) based on the DLRM (49,649 words) showed the following makeup:


title: Romanian language

text: If the analysis is restricted to a core vocabulary of 2,500 frequent, semantically rich and productive words, then the Latin inheritance comes first, followed by Romance and classical Latin neologisms, whereas the Slavic borrowings come third.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian has a lexical similarity of 77% with Italian, 75% with French, 74% with Sardinian, 73% with Catalan, 72% with Portuguese and Rheto-Romance, 71% with Spanish.


title: Romanian language

text: Although they are rarely used nowadays, the Romanian calendar used to have the traditional Romanian month names, unique to the language.


title: Romanian language

text: The longest word in Romanian is , with 44 letters, but the longest one admitted by the "Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române" ("Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian Language", DEX) is , with 25 letters.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian nouns are characterized by gender (feminine, masculine, and neuter), and declined by number (singular and plural) and case (nominative/accusative, dative/genitive and vocative). The articles, as well as most adjectives and pronouns, agree in gender, number and case with the noun they modify.


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian is the only Romance language where definite articles are enclitic: that is, attached to the end of the noun (as in Scandinavian, Bulgarian and Albanian), instead of in front (proclitic). They were formed, as in other Romance languages, from the Latin demonstrative pronouns.


title: Romanian language

text: As in all Romance languages, Romanian verbs are highly inflected for person, number, tense, mood, and voice. The usual word order in sentences is subject–verb–object (SVO). Romanian has four verbal conjugations which further split into ten conjugation patterns. Verbs can be put in five moods that are inflected for the person (indicative, conditional/optative, imperative, subjunctive, and presumptive) and four impersonal moods (infinitive, gerund, supine, and participle).


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian has seven vowels: , , , , , and . Additionally, and may appear in some borrowed words. Arguably, the diphthongs and are also part of the phoneme set. There are twenty-two consonants. The two approximants and can appear before or after any vowel, creating a large number of glide-vowel sequences which are, strictly speaking, not diphthongs.


title: Romanian language

text: In final positions after consonants, a short can be deleted, surfacing only as the palatalization of the preceding consonant (e.g., ). Similarly, a deleted may prompt labialization of a preceding consonant, though this has ceased to carry any morphological meaning.


title: Romanian language

text: Owing to its isolation from the other Romance languages, the phonetic evolution of Romanian was quite different, but the language does share a few changes with Italian, such as → (Lat. clarus → Rom. chiar, Ital. chiaro, Lat. clamare → Rom. chemare, Ital. chiamare) and → (Lat. *glacia (glacies) → Rom. gheață, Ital. ghiaccia, ghiaccio, Lat. *ungla (ungula) → Rom. unghie, Ital. unghia), although this did not go as far as it did in Italian with other similar clusters (Rom. place, Ital. piace); another similarity with Italian is the change from or to or (Lat. pax, pacem → Rom. and Ital. pace, Lat. dulcem → Rom. dulce, Ital. dolce, Lat. circus → Rom. cerc, Ital. circo) and or to or (Lat. gelu → Rom. ger, Ital. gelo, Lat. marginem → Rom. and Ital. margine, Lat. gemere → Rom. geme (gemere), Ital. gemere). There are also a few changes shared with Dalmatian, such as (probably phonetically ) → (Lat. cognatus → Rom. cumnat, Dalm. comnut) and → in some situations (Lat. coxa → Rom. coapsă, Dalm. copsa).


title: Romanian language

text: Romanian has entirely lost Latin (qu), turning it either into (Lat. quattuor → Rom. "patru", "four"; cf. It. "quattro") or (Lat. quando → Rom. "când", "when"; Lat. quale → Rom. "care", "which"). In fact, in modern re-borrowings, while isolated cases of /kw/ exist, as in "cuaternar" "quaternary", it usually takes the German-like form /kv/, as in "acvatic", "aquatic". Notably, it also failed to develop the palatalised sounds and , which exist at least historically in all other major Romance languages, and even in neighbouring non-Romance languages such as Serbian and Hungarian. However, the other Eastern Romance languages kept these sounds, so it's likely old Romanian had them as well.


title: Romanian language

text: The first written record about a Romance language spoken in the Middle Ages in the Balkans is from 587. A Vlach muleteer accompanying the Byzantine army noticed that the load was falling from one of the animals and shouted to a companion "Torna, torna, fratre!" (meaning "Return, return, brother!"). Theophanes Confessor recorded it as part of a 6th-century military expedition by Comentiolus and Priscus against the Avars and Slovenes.


title: Romanian language

text: The oldest surviving written text in Romanian is a letter from late June 1521, in which Neacșu of Câmpulung wrote to the mayor of Brașov about an imminent attack of the Turks. It was written using the Cyrillic alphabet, like most early Romanian writings. The earliest surviving writing in Latin script was a late 16th-century Transylvanian text which was written with the Hungarian alphabet conventions.


title: Romanian language

text: In the 18th century, Transylvanian scholars noted the Latin origin of Romanian and adapted the Latin alphabet to the Romanian language, using some orthographic rules from Italian, recognized as Romanian's closest relative. The Cyrillic alphabet remained in (gradually decreasing) use until 1860, when Romanian writing was first officially regulated.


title: Romanian language

text: In the Soviet Republic of Moldova, the Russian-derived Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet was used until 1989, when the Romanian Latin alphabet was introduced; in the breakaway territory of Transnistria the Cyrillic alphabet remains in use.


title: Romanian language

text: K, Q, W and Y, not part of the native alphabet, were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982 and are mostly used to write loanwords like "kilogram", "quasar", "watt", and "yoga".


title: Romanian language

text: The Romanian alphabet is based on the Latin script with five additional letters , , , , . Formerly, there were as many as 12 additional letters, but some of them were abolished in subsequent reforms. Also, until the early 20th century, a breve marker was used, which survives only in ă.


title: Romanian language

text: Today the Romanian alphabet is largely phonemic. However, the letters "â" and "î" both represent the same close central unrounded vowel . "Â" is used only inside words; "î" is used at the beginning or the end of non-compound words and in the middle of compound words. Another exception from a completely phonetic writing system is the fact that vowels and their respective semivowels are not distinguished in writing. In dictionaries the distinction is marked by separating the entry word into syllables for words containing a hiatus.


title: Romanian language

text: Stressed vowels also are not marked in writing, except very rarely in cases where by misplacing the stress a word might change its meaning and if the meaning is not obvious from the context. For example, "trei copíi" means "three children" while "trei cópii" means "three copies".


title: Romanian language

text: In 1993, new spelling rules were proposed by the Romanian Academy. In 2000, the Moldovan Academy recommended adopting the same spelling rules, and in 2010 the Academy launched a schedule for the transition to the new rules that was intended to be completed by publications in 2011.


title: Romanian language

text: On 17 October 2016, Minister of Education Corina Fusu signed Order No. 872, adopting the revised spelling rules as recommended by the Moldovan Academy of Sciences, coming into force on the day of signing (due to be completed within two school years). From this day, the spelling as used by institutions subordinated to the ministry of education is in line with the Romanian Academy's 1993 recommendation. This order, however, has no application to other government institutions and neither has Law 3462 of 1989 (which provided for the means of transliterating of Cyrillic to Latin) been amended to reflect these changes; thus, these institutions, along with most Moldovans, prefer to use the spelling adopted in 1989 (when the language with Latin script became official).


title: Romanian language

text: The sentence rewritten to exclude all loanwords. The meaning is somewhat compromised due to the paucity of native vocabulary:


title: Bradley Whitford

text: Bradley Whitford (born October 10, 1959) is an American actor and producer. He is best known for his portrayal of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman in the NBC television political drama "The West Wing" (1999–2006), for which he was nominated for three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards from 2001 to 2003, winning in 2001. The role earned him three consecutive Golden Globe Award nominations.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: In addition to "The West Wing", Whitford played Danny Tripp in "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip", Dan Stark in the Fox police buddy-comedy "The Good Guys", Timothy Carter, a character who was believed to be Red John, in the CBS series "The Mentalist", antagonist Eric Gordon in the film "Billy Madison", Arthur Parsons in "The Post", Dean Armitage in the horror film "Get Out", Roger Peralta in "Brooklyn Nine-Nine", President Gray in the dystopian science fiction film "The Darkest Minds" and Rick Stanton in the monster film .


title: Bradley Whitford

text: In 2015, he won a second Primetime Emmy Award for his role as Marcy in "Transparent" and later garnered a fifth Primetime Emmy Award nomination for portraying Magnus Hirschfeld in the same series. Since 2018, Whitford has portrayed Commander Joseph Lawrence in Hulu dystopian drama "The Handmaid's Tale", for which he won his third Primetime Emmy Award in 2019.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: Whitford was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Genevieve Louie (née Smith; 1915–2011) and George Van Norman Whitford (1915–1999). Between the ages of three and fourteen, he lived in Wayne, Pennsylvania. His mother, a poet, later resided in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. He grew up in a Quaker household. Whitford graduated from Madison East High School in 1977. He majored in English and theatre at Wesleyan University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1981, where he was a roommate of producer Paul Schiff. Whitford then studied drama at the Juilliard School, where he was a member of "Group 14".


title: Bradley Whitford

text: The NBC series "Who Do You Think You Are?" explored Whitford's ancestry in an August 2022 episode, including ancestors who fought in a crucial American Civil War battle.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: Whitford first appearance on television was in a 1985 episode of "The Equalizer" followed by a two-year recurring role on the ABC daytime drama "All My Children". His film debut was in the 1986 film "Dead as a Doorman". He made his Broadway theatre debut in 1990 playing Lt. Jack Ross (followed a few months later in the lead role of Lt. Daniel Kaffee), in the Aaron Sorkin written play "A Few Good Men". This was the beginning of a recurring working relationship between Whitford and Sorkin. Whitford made a guest appearance on "ER" in the episode "Love's Labor Lost".


title: Bradley Whitford

text: Whitford joined the cast of Sorkin's "The West Wing" as Josh Lyman with the show's premiere in 1999. For his role, he won an Emmy Award in 2001 for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. Whitford also wrote two episodes of the series ("Faith Based Initiative" in the sixth season and "Internal Displacement" in the seventh). After "The West Wing" ended in May 2006, Whitford appeared in Sorkin's later series "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" playing the role of Danny Tripp. He appeared in the British drama "Burn Up" on the BBC in July 2008.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: He starred in the play "Boeing-Boeing" which opened on Broadway on May 4, 2008. He co-starred in the Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard horror film "The Cabin in the Woods", filmed in 2009 but not released until April 2012. In 2010, Whitford starred as Dan Stark in the Fox TV comedy "The Good Guys" opposite Colin Hanks. In 2011, Whitford guest-starred in "In Plain Sight" on USA Network as a man combatting paranoia. He appeared in the season three finale of "The Mentalist" as a minion of and decoy for "Red John", the long-sought nemesis of the show's protagonist Patrick Jane. Whitford appeared on "" as a lawyer. On September 15, 2011, he starred in the one-night-only staged reading of "8", a play that chronicles the trial surrounding California's Proposition 8, written by Dustin Lance Black.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: In 2013, Whitford played Pete Harrison in the ABC comedy "Trophy Wife", which was canceled after one season. In 2014, Whitford appeared in a recurring role as a cross-dressing businessman during the first season of the Amazon Studios series "Transparent". He went on to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his performance. He returned during the series' second season as Magnus Hirschfeld. Since 2015, Whitford has had a recurring role in "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" as Roger Peralta, father of lead character Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg). In 2017, Whitford played Dean Armitage, a father and neurosurgeon, in the racially themed horror film "Get Out".


title: Bradley Whitford

text: In 2018, he joined the cast of the web dystopian tragedy "The Handmaid's Tale" as Commander Joseph Lawrence, guest starring in the final two episodes of the second season. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2019 for his performance and became the first person to have won the guest acting Emmy Awards for both comedy and drama. He returned as a series regular for the third season and garnered a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. From 2019 to 2020, he starred in the musical comedy series "Perfect Harmony", which ran for one season on NBC.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: Whitford married actress Jane Kaczmarek in August 1992. They have three children together: Frances Genevieve (born October 1997), George Edward (born December 1999), and Mary Louisa (born November 2002). In June 2009, the couple announced that they were divorcing after 16 years of marriage, and the divorce was finalized in October 2010.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: Whitford began dating his "Transparent" co-star Amy Landecker in 2015. They announced their engagement in March 2018. Whitford and Landecker eloped on July 17, 2019.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: In May 2007, Whitford was honored by Alliance for Justice, a nonprofit organization, as the 2007 Champion of Justice. He was the keynote speaker for Class Day at Princeton University in June 2007. As of 2012, Whitford serves on the Board of Trustees of his alma mater, Wesleyan University.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: Whitford has been described as having "liberal views". He contributed to "The Huffington Post" as a columnist. He serves on the Board of Advisors of Let America Vote, an organization founded by former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander that aims to end voter suppression. He serves on the advisory board of Citizens' Climate Lobby, an international grassroots environmental group founded by Marshall L. Saunders that trains and supports volunteers to build relationships with their elected representatives in order to influence climate policy.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: In 2011, Whitford spoke at a protest in his native Madison, Wisconsin, in opposition to Governor Scott Walker's budget repair bill. Prior to the 2012 United States elections, Whitford and Courage Campaign founder, Rick Jacobs, appeared together in a video that elaborated on California's Proposition 30 and Proposition 32; the video encouraged viewers to vote "yes" on the former and "no" on the latter. Leading up to the 2014 Wisconsin gubernatorial election, Whitford visited multiple University of Wisconsin System campuses in support of nominee Mary Burke, who went on to lose against incumbent Governor Scott Walker. Whitford supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election. He has been a vocal critic of former US President Donald Trump.


title: Bradley Whitford

text: In 2019, he co-hosted a fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg alongside actress Gwyneth Paltrow as well as donated to Buttigieg's 2020 presidential campaign. That same year, Whitford appeared in a public service announcement in support of abortion rights alongside other cast members of "The Handmaid's Tale". The following year, he appeared as part of a series of "surprise virtual appearances" in support of Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: William Randolph Hearst Sr. (; April 29, 1863 – August 14, 1951) was an American businessman, newspaper publisher, and politician known for developing the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of "The San Francisco Examiner" by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: After moving to New York City, Hearst acquired the "New York Journal" and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's "New York World". Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendos. Hearst acquired more newspapers and created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. Hearst controlled the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines, and thereby often published his personal views. He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain. Historians, however, reject his subsequent claims to have started the war with Spain as overly extravagant.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives. He ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1904, Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, and for Governor of New York in 1906. During his political career, he espoused views generally associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: After 1918 and the end of World War I, Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians. He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right. Hearst's publication reached a peak circulation of 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s. He poorly managed finances and was so deeply in debt during the Great Depression that most of his assets had to be liquidated in the late 1930s. Hearst managed to keep his newspapers and magazines.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: His life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles's film "Citizen Kane" (1941). His Hearst Castle, constructed on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, has been preserved as a State Historical Monument and is designated as a National Historic Landmark.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst was born in San Francisco to George Hearst, a millionaire mining engineer, owner of gold and other mines through his corporation, and his much younger wife Phoebe Apperson Hearst, from a small town in Missouri. The elder Hearst later entered politics. He served as a U.S. Senator, first appointed for a brief period in 1886 and was then elected later that year. He served from 1887 to his death in 1891.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: His paternal great-grandfather was John Hearst of Ulster Protestant origin. John Hearst, with his wife and six children, migrated to America from Ballybay, County Monaghan, Ireland, as part of the Cahans Exodus in 1766. The family settled in South Carolina. Their immigration to South Carolina was spurred in part by the colonial government's policy that encouraged the immigration of Irish Protestants, many of Scots origin. The names "John Hearse" and "John Hearse Jr." appear on the council records of October 26, 1766, being credited with meriting of land on the Long Canes (in what became Abbeville District), based upon to heads of household and for each dependent of a Protestant immigrant. The "Hearse" spelling of the family name was never used afterward by the family members themselves, nor any family of any size. A separate theory purports that one branch of a "Hurst" family of Virginia (originally from Plymouth Colony) moved to South Carolina at about the same time and changed the spelling of its surname of over a century to that of the immigrant Hearsts. Hearst's mother, née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson, was also of Scots-Irish ancestry; her family came from Galway. She was appointed as the first woman Regent of University of California, Berkeley, donated funds to establish libraries at several universities, funded many anthropological expeditions, and founded the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst attended preparatory school at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He enrolled in the Harvard College class of 1885. While there, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the A.D. Club (a Harvard Final club), the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and the "Lampoon" before being expelled. His antics had ranged from sponsoring massive beer parties in Harvard Square to sending pudding pots used as chamber pots to his professors (their images were depicted within the bowls).


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Searching for an occupation, in 1887 Hearst took over management of his father's newspaper, the "San Francisco Examiner", which his father had acquired in 1880 as repayment for a gambling debt. Giving his paper the motto "Monarch of the Dailies", Hearst acquired the most advanced equipment and the most prominent writers of the time, including Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Jack London, and political cartoonist Homer Davenport. A self-proclaimed populist, Hearst reported accounts of municipal and financial corruption, often attacking companies in which his own family held an interest. Within a few years, his paper dominated the San Francisco market.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Early in his career at the "San Francisco Examiner," Hearst envisioned running a large newspaper chain and "always knew that his dream of a nation-spanning, multi-paper news operation was impossible without a triumph in New York". In 1895, with the financial support of his widowed mother (his father had died in 1891), Hearst bought the failing "New York Morning Journal", hiring writers such as Stephen Crane and Julian Hawthorne and entering into a head-to-head circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer, owner and publisher of the "New York World." Hearst "stole" Richard F. Outcault, the creator of color comics along with all of Pulitzer's Sunday staff. Another prominent hire was James J. Montague, who came from the "Portland Oregonian" and started his well-known "More Truth Than Poetry" column at the Hearst-owned "New York Evening Journal."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: When Hearst purchased the "penny paper", so called because its copies sold for a penny apiece, the "Journal" was competing with New York's 16 other major dailies. It had a strong focus on Democratic Party politics. Hearst imported his best managers from the "San Francisco Examiner" and "quickly established himself as the most attractive employer" among New York newspapers. He was seen as generous, paid more than his competitors, and gave credit to his writers with page-one bylines. Further, he was unfailingly polite, unassuming, "impeccably calm", and indulgent of "prima donnas, eccentrics, bohemians, drunks, or reprobates so long as they had useful talents".


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst's activist approach to journalism can be summarized by the motto, "While others Talk, the "Journal" Acts."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: The New York "Journal" and its chief rival, the "New York World," mastered a style of popular journalism that came to be derided as "yellow journalism", so named after Outcault's Yellow Kid comic. Pulitzer's "World" had pushed the boundaries of mass appeal for newspapers through bold headlines, aggressive news gathering, generous use of cartoons and illustrations, populist politics, progressive crusades, an exuberant public spirit, and dramatic crime and human-interest stories. Hearst's "Journal" used the same recipe for success, forcing Pulitzer to drop the price of the "World" from two cents to a penny. Soon the two papers were locked in a fierce, often spiteful competition for readers in which both papers spent large sums of money and saw huge gains in circulation.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Within a few months of purchasing the "Journal", Hearst hired away Pulitzer's three top editors: Sunday editor Morrill Goddard, who greatly expanded the scope and appeal of the American Sunday newspaper; Solomon Carvalho; and a young Arthur Brisbane, who became managing editor of the Hearst newspaper empire and a well-known columnist. Contrary to popular assumption, they were not lured away by higher pay—rather, each man had grown tired of the office environment that Pulitzer encouraged.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: While Hearst's many critics attribute the "Journal"s incredible success to cheap sensationalism, Kenneth Whyte noted in "The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise Of William Randolph Hearst": "Rather than racing to the bottom, he [Hearst] drove the "Journal" and the penny press upmarket. The "Journal" was a demanding, sophisticated paper by contemporary standards." Though yellow journalism would be much maligned, Whyte said, "All good yellow journalists ... sought the human in every story and edited without fear of emotion or drama. They wore their feelings on their pages, believing it was an honest and wholesome way to communicate with readers", but, as Whyte pointed out: "This appeal to feelings is not an end in itself... [they believed] our emotions tend to ignite our intellects: a story catering to a reader's feelings is more likely than a dry treatise to stimulate thought."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: The two papers finally declared a truce in late 1898, after both lost vast amounts of money covering the Spanish–American War. Hearst probably lost several million dollars in his first three years as publisher of the "Journal" (figures are impossible to verify), but the paper began turning a profit after it ended its fight with the "World."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Under Hearst, the "Journal" remained loyal to the populist or left wing of the Democratic Party. It was the only major publication in the East to support William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Its coverage of that election was probably the most important of any newspaper in the country, attacking relentlessly the unprecedented role of money in the Republican campaign and the dominating role played by William McKinley's political and financial manager, Mark Hanna, the first national party 'boss' in American history. A year after taking over the paper, Hearst could boast that sales of the "Journal's" post-election issue (including the evening and German-language editions) topped 1.5 million, a record "unparalleled in the history of the world."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: The "Journal's" political coverage, however, was not entirely one-sided. Kenneth Whyte says that most editors of the time "believed their papers should speak with one voice on political matters"; by contrast, in New York, Hearst "helped to usher in the multi-perspective approach we identify with the modern op-ed page". At first he supported the Russian Revolution of 1917 but later he turned against it. Hearst fought hard against Wilsonian internationalism, the League of Nations, and the World Court, thereby appealing to an isolationist audience.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: The "Morning Journal's" daily circulation routinely climbed above the 1 million mark after the sinking of the and U.S. entry into the Spanish–American War, a war that some called The "Journal"s War, due to the paper's immense influence in provoking American outrage against Spain. Much of the coverage leading up to the war, beginning with the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution in 1895, was tainted by rumor, propaganda, and sensationalism, with the "yellow" papers regarded as the worst offenders. The "Journal" and other New York newspapers were so one-sided and full of errors in their reporting that coverage of the Cuban crisis and the ensuing Spanish–American War is often cited as one of the most significant milestones in the rise of yellow journalism's hold over the mainstream media. Huge headlines in the "Journal" assigned blame for the "Maine's" destruction on sabotage, which was based on no evidence. This reporting stoked outrage and indignation against Spain among the paper's readers in New York.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: The "Journal's" crusade against Spanish rule in Cuba was not due to mere jingoism, although "the democratic ideals and humanitarianism that inspired their coverage are largely lost to history," as are their "heroic efforts to find the truth on the island under unusually difficult circumstances." The "Journal's" journalistic activism in support of the Cuban rebels, rather, was centered around Hearst's political and business ambitions.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Perhaps the best known myth in American journalism is the claim, without any contemporary evidence, that the illustrator Frederic Remington, sent by Hearst to Cuba to cover the Cuban War of Independence, cabled Hearst to tell him all was quiet in Cuba. Hearst, in this canard, is said to have responded, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst was personally dedicated to the cause of the Cuban rebels, and the "Journal" did some of the most important and courageous reporting on the conflict—as well as some of the most sensationalized. Their stories on the Cuban rebellion and Spain's atrocities on the island—many of which turned out to be untrue—were motivated primarily by Hearst's outrage at Spain's brutal policies on the island. These had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Cubans. The most well-known story involved the imprisonment and escape of Cuban prisoner Evangelina Cisneros.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: While Hearst and the yellow press did not directly cause America's war with Spain, they inflamed public opinion in New York City to a fever pitch. New York's elites read other papers, such as the "Times" and "Sun", which were far more restrained. The "Journal" and the "World" were local papers oriented to a very large working class audience in New York City. They were not among the top ten sources of news in papers in other cities, and their stories did not make a splash outside New York City. Outrage across the country came from evidence of what Spain was doing in Cuba, a major influence in the decision by Congress to declare war.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: According to a 21st-century historian, war was declared by Congress because public opinion was sickened by the bloodshed, and because leaders like McKinley realized that Spain had lost control of Cuba. These factors weighed more on the president's mind than the melodramas in the "New York Journal."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst sailed to Cuba with a small army of "Journal" reporters to cover the Spanish–American War; they brought along portable printing equipment, which was used to print a single-edition newspaper in Cuba after the fighting had ended. Two of the "Journal's" correspondents, James Creelman and Edward Marshall, were wounded in the fighting. A leader of the Cuban rebels, Gen. Calixto García, gave Hearst a Cuban flag that had been riddled with bullets as a gift, in appreciation of Hearst's major role in Cuba's liberation.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In part to aid in his political ambitions, Hearst opened newspapers in other cities, among them Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. In 1915, he founded International Film Service, an animation studio designed to exploit the popularity of the comic strips he controlled. The creation of his Chicago paper was requested by the Democratic National Committee. Hearst used this as an excuse for his mother Phoebe Hearst to transfer him the necessary start-up funds. By the mid-1920s he had a nationwide string of 28 newspapers, among them the "Los Angeles Examiner", the "Boston American", the "Atlanta Georgian", the "Chicago Examiner", the "Detroit Times", the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer", the "Washington Times", the "Washington Herald", and his flagship, the "San Francisco Examiner".


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst also diversified his publishing interests into book publishing and magazines. Several of the latter are still in circulation, including such periodicals as "Cosmopolitan", "Good Housekeeping", "Town and Country", and "Harper's Bazaar".


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1924, Hearst opened the "New York Daily Mirror," a racy tabloid frankly imitating the "New York Daily News." Among his other holdings were two news services, Universal News and International News Service, or INS, the latter of which he founded in 1909. He also owned INS companion radio station WINS in New York; King Features Syndicate, which still owns the copyrights of a number of popular comics characters; a film company, Cosmopolitan Productions; extensive New York City real estate; and thousands of acres of land in California and Mexico, along with timber and mining interests inherited from his father.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst promoted writers and cartoonists despite the lack of any apparent demand for them by his readers. The press critic A. J. Liebling reminds us how many of Hearst's stars would not have been deemed employable elsewhere. One Hearst favorite, George Herriman, was the inventor of the dizzy comic strip "Krazy Kat." Not especially popular with either readers or editors when it was first published, in the 21st century, it is considered a classic, a belief once held only by Hearst himself.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1929, he became one of the sponsors of the first round-the-world voyage in an airship, the LZ 127 "Graf Zeppelin" from Germany. His sponsorship was conditional on the trip starting at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey. The ship's captain, Dr. Hugo Eckener, first flew the "Graf Zeppelin" across the Atlantic from Germany to pick up Hearst's photographer and at least three Hearst correspondents. One of them, Grace Marguerite Hay Drummond-Hay, by that flight became the first woman to travel around the world by air.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: The Hearst news empire reached a revenue peak about 1928, but the economic collapse of the Great Depression in the United States and the vast over-extension of his empire cost him control of his holdings. It is unlikely that the newspapers ever paid their own way; mining, ranching and forestry provided whatever dividends the Hearst Corporation paid out. When the collapse came, all Hearst properties were hit hard, but none more so than the papers. Hearst's conservative politics, increasingly at odds with those of his readers, worsened matters for the once great Hearst media chain. Having been refused the right to sell another round of bonds to unsuspecting investors, the shaky empire tottered. Unable to service its existing debts, Hearst Corporation faced a court-mandated reorganization in 1937.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: From that point, Hearst was reduced to being an employee, subject to the directives of an outside manager. Newspapers and other properties were liquidated, the film company shut down; there was even a well-publicized sale of art and antiquities. While World War II restored circulation and advertising revenues, his great days were over. The Hearst Corporation continues to this day as a large, privately held media conglomerate based in New York City.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst won two elections to Congress, then lost a series of elections. He narrowly failed in attempts to become mayor of New York City in both 1905 and 1909 and governor of New York in 1906, nominally remaining a Democrat while also creating the Independence Party. He was defeated for the governorship by Charles Evans Hughes. Hearst's unsuccessful campaigns for office after his tenure in the House of Representatives earned him the unflattering but short-lived nickname of "William 'Also-Randolph' Hearst", which was coined by Wallace Irwin.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst was on the left wing of the Progressive Movement, speaking on behalf of the working class (who bought his papers) and denouncing the rich and powerful (who disdained his editorials). With the support of Tammany Hall (the regular Democratic organization in Manhattan), Hearst was elected to Congress from New York in 1902 and 1904. He made a major effort to win the 1904 Democratic nomination for president, losing to conservative Alton B. Parker. Breaking with Tammany in 1907, Hearst ran for mayor of New York City under a third party of his own creation, the Municipal Ownership League. Tammany Hall exerted its utmost to defeat him.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: An opponent of the British Empire, Hearst opposed American involvement in the First World War and attacked the formation of the League of Nations. His newspapers abstained from endorsing any candidate in 1920 and 1924. Hearst's last bid for office came in 1922, when he was backed by Tammany Hall leaders for the U.S. Senate nomination in New York. Al Smith vetoed this, earning the lasting enmity of Hearst. Although Hearst shared Smith's opposition to Prohibition, he swung his papers behind Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election. Hearst's support for Franklin D. Roosevelt at the 1932 Democratic National Convention, via his allies William Gibbs McAdoo and John Nance Garner, can also be seen as part of his vendetta against Smith, who was an opponent of Roosevelt's at that convention.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: During the 1920s Hearst was a Jeffersonian democrat. He warned citizens against the dangers of big government and against unchecked federal power that could infringe on individual rights. Hearst supported FDR in 1932, but then became critical of the New Deal. More and more often, Hearst newspapers supported business over organized labor and condemned higher income tax legislation.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst broke with FDR in spring 1935 when the president vetoed the Patman Bonus Bill for veterans and tried to enter the World Court. Hearst's papers were his weapon. They carried the publisher's rambling, vitriolic, all-capital-letters editorials, but he no longer employed the energetic reporters, editors, and columnists who might have made a serious attack. He reached 20 million readers in the mid-1930s, but they included much of the working class which Roosevelt had attracted by three-to-one margins in the 1936 election. The Hearst papers—like most major chains—had supported the Republican Alf Landon that year.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: While campaigning against Roosevelt's policy of developing formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, in 1935 Hearst ordered his editors to reprint eyewitness accounts of the Ukrainian famine (the Holodomor). These had been supplied in 1933 by Welsh freelance journalist Gareth Jones, and by the disillusioned American Communist Fred Beal. "The New York Times," content with what it has since conceded was "tendentious" reporting of Soviet achievements, printed the blanket denials of its Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. Duranty, who was widely credited with facilitating the rapprochement with Moscow, dismissed the Hearst-circulated reports of man-made starvation as a politically motivated "scare story".


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In the articles, written by Thomas Walker, to better serve Hearst's editorial line against Roosevelt's Soviet policy the famine was "updated"; placed in 1934 rather than 1932–1933. In "The Nation", Louis Fischer accused Walker of pure invention. Fischer had been to Ukraine in 1934 and had seen no famine. He interpreted the whole affair as merely an attempt by Hearst to "spoil Soviet-American relations" as part of "an anti-red campaign".


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1934, after checking with Jewish leaders to ensure a visit would be to their benefit, Hearst visited Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. When Hitler asked why he was so misunderstood by the American press, Hearst retorted: "Because Americans believe in democracy, and are averse to dictatorship." Hearst's papers ran columns without rebuttal by Nazi leader Hermann Göring and Hitler himself, as well as Mussolini and other dictators in Europe and Latin America. During that same year 1934, Japan / U.S. relations were unstable. In an attempt to remedy this, Prince Tokugawa Iesato traveled throughout the United States on a goodwill visit. During his visit, Prince Iesato and his delegation met with William Randolph Hearst with the hope of improving mutual understanding between the two nations.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1903, Hearst married Millicent Veronica Willson (1882–1974), a 21-year-old chorus girl, in New York City. Evidence in Louis Pizzitola's book, "Hearst Over Hollywood", indicates that Millicent's mother Hannah Willson ran a Tammany-connected and protected brothel near the headquarters of political power in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. Millicent bore him five sons: George Randolph Hearst, born on April 23, 1904; William Randolph Hearst Jr., born on January 27, 1908; John Randolph Hearst, born in 1910; and twins Randolph Apperson Hearst and David Whitmire (né Elbert Willson) Hearst, born on December 2, 1915.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Conceding an end to his political hopes, Hearst became involved in an affair with the film actress and comedian Marion Davies (1897–1961), former mistress of his friend Paul Block. From about 1919, he lived openly with her in California. After the death of Patricia Lake (1919/1923–1993), who had been presented as Davies's "niece," her family confirmed that she was Davies's and Hearst's daughter. She had acknowledged this before her death.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Millicent separated from Hearst in the mid-1920s after tiring of his longtime affair with Davies, but the couple remained legally married until Hearst's death. Millicent built an independent life for herself in New York City as a leading philanthropist. She was active in society and in 1921 created the Free Milk Fund for the poor.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: George Hearst invested some of his fortune from the Comstock Lode in land. In 1865 he purchased about , part of Rancho Piedra Blanca stretching from Simeon Bay and reached to Ragged Point. He paid the original grantee Jose de Jesus Pico USD$1 an acre, about twice the current market price. Hearst continued to buy parcels whenever they became available. He also bought most of Rancho San Simeon.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1865, Hearst bought all of Rancho Santa Rosa totaling except one section of that Estrada lived on. However, as was common with claims before the Public Land Commission, Estrada's legal claim was costly and took many years to resolve. Estrada mortgaged the ranch to Domingo Pujol, a Spanish-born San Francisco lawyer, who represented him. Estrada was unable to pay the loan and Pujol foreclosed on it. Estrada did not have the title to the land. Hearst sued, but ended up with only of Estrada's holdings.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In the 1920s William Hearst developed an interest in acquiring additional land along the Central Coast of California that he could add to land he inherited from his father. Rancho Milpitas was a land grant given in 1838 by California governor Juan Bautista Alvarado to Ygnacio Pastor. The grant encompassed present-day Jolon and land to the west. When Pastor obtained title from the Public Land Commission in 1875, Faxon Atherton immediately purchased the land. By 1880, the James Brown Cattle Company owned and operated Rancho Milpitas and neighboring Rancho Los Ojitos.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1923, Newhall Land sold Rancho San Miguelito de Trinidad and Rancho El Piojo to William Randolph Hearst. In 1925, Hearst's Piedmont Land and Cattle Company bought Rancho Milpitas and Rancho Los Ojitos (Little Springs) from the James Brown Cattle Company. Hearst gradually bought adjoining land until he owned bout .


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: On December 12, 1940, Hearst sold , including the Rancho Milpitas, to the United States government. Neighboring landowners sold another to create the Hunter Liggett Military Reservation troop training base for the War Department. The US Army used a ranch house and guest lodge named The Hacienda as housing for the base commander, for visiting officers, and for the officers' club.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1916, the Eberhard and Kron Tanning Company of Santa Cruz purchased land from the homesteaders along the Little Sur River. They harvested tanbark oak and brought the bark out on mules and crude wooden sleds known as "go-devils" to Notleys Landing at the mouth of Palo Colorado Canyon, where it was loaded via cable onto ships anchored offshore. Hearst was interested in preserving the uncut, abundant redwood forest, and on November 18, 1921, he purchased the land from the tanning company for about $50,000. On July 23, 1948, the Monterey Bay Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America purchased the property, originally , from the Hearst Sunical Land and Packing Company for $20,000. On September 9, 1948, Albert M. Lester of Carmel obtained a grant for the council of $20,000 from Hearst through the Hearst Foundation of New York City, offsetting the cost of the purchase.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Beginning in 1919, Hearst began to build Hearst Castle, which he never completed, on the ranch he had acquired near San Simeon. He furnished the mansion with art, antiques, and entire historic rooms purchased and brought from great houses in Europe. He established an Arabian horse breeding operation on the grounds.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst also owned property on the McCloud River in Siskiyou County, in far northern California, called Wyntoon. The buildings at Wyntoon were designed by architect Julia Morgan, who also designed Hearst Castle and worked in collaboration with William J. Dodd on a number of other projects.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1947, Hearst paid $120,000 for an H-shaped Beverly Hills mansion, (located at 1011 N. Beverly Dr.), on 3.7 acres three blocks from Sunset Boulevard. The Beverly House, as it has come to be known, has some cinematic connections. According to "Hearst Over Hollywood", John and Jacqueline Kennedy stayed at the house for part of their honeymoon. The house appeared in the film "The Godfather" (1972).


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In the early 1890s, Hearst began building a mansion on the hills overlooking Pleasanton, California, on land purchased by his father a decade earlier. Hearst's mother took over the project, hired Julia Morgan to finish it as her home, and named it Hacienda del Pozo de Verona. After her death, it was acquired by Castlewood Country Club, which used it as their clubhouse from 1925 to 1969, when it was destroyed in a major fire.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst was renowned for his extensive collection of international art that spanned centuries. Most notable in his collection were his Greek vases, Spanish and Italian furniture, Oriental carpets, Renaissance vestments, an extensive library with many books signed by their authors, and paintings and statues. In addition to collecting pieces of fine art, he also gathered manuscripts, rare books, and autographs. His guests included varied celebrities and politicians, who stayed in rooms furnished with pieces of antique furniture and decorated with artwork by famous artists.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Beginning in 1937, Hearst began selling some of his art collection to help relieve the debt burden he had suffered from the Depression. The first year he sold items for a total of $11 million. In 1941 he put about 20,000 items up for sale; these were evidence of his wide and varied tastes. Included in the sale items were paintings by van Dyke, crosiers, chalices, Charles Dickens's sideboard, pulpits, stained glass, arms and armor, George Washington's waistcoat, and Thomas Jefferson's Bible. When Hearst Castle was donated to the State of California, it was still sufficiently furnished for the whole house to be considered and operated as a museum.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: After seeing photographs, in "Country Life Magazine", of St. Donat's Castle in Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, Hearst bought and renovated it in 1925 as a gift to Davies. The Castle was restored by Hearst, who spent a fortune buying entire rooms from other castles and palaces across the UK and Europe. The Great Hall was bought from the Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire and reconstructed brick by brick in its current site at St. Donat's. From the Bradenstoke Priory, he also bought and removed the guest house, Prior's lodging, and great tithe barn; of these, some of the materials became the St. Donat's banqueting hall, complete with a sixteenth-century French chimney-piece and windows; also used were a fireplace dated to c. 1514 and a fourteenth-century roof, which became part of the Bradenstoke Hall, despite this use being questioned in Parliament. Hearst built 34 green and white marble bathrooms for the many guest suites in the castle and completed a series of terraced gardens which survive intact today. Hearst and Davies spent much of their time entertaining, and held a number of lavish parties attended by guests including Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Winston Churchill, and a young John F. Kennedy. When Hearst died, the castle was purchased by Antonin Besse II and donated to Atlantic College, an international boarding school founded by Kurt Hahn in 1962, which still uses it.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst was particularly interested in the newly emerging technologies relating to aviation and had his first experience of flight in January 1910, in Los Angeles. Louis Paulhan, a French aviator, took him for an air trip on his Farman biplane. Hearst also sponsored "Old Glory" as well as the Hearst Transcontinental Prize.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst's crusade against Roosevelt and the New Deal, combined with union strikes and boycotts of his properties, undermined the financial strength of his empire. Circulation of his major publications declined in the mid-1930s, while rivals such as the New York "Daily News" were flourishing. He refused to take effective cost-cutting measures, and instead increased his very expensive art purchases. His friend Joseph P. Kennedy offered to buy the magazines, but Hearst jealously guarded his empire and refused. Instead, he sold some of his heavily mortgaged real estate. San Simeon itself was mortgaged to "Los Angeles Times" owner Harry Chandler in 1933 for $600,000.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Finally his financial advisors realized he was tens of millions of dollars in debt, and could not pay the interest on the loans, let alone reduce the principal. The proposed bond sale failed to attract investors when Hearst's financial crisis became widely known. Marion Davies's stardom waned and Hearst's movies also began to hemorrhage money. As the crisis deepened he let go of most of his household staff, sold his exotic animals to the Los Angeles Zoo and named a trustee to control his finances. He still refused to sell his beloved newspapers. At one point, to avoid outright bankruptcy, he had to accept a $1 million loan from Marion Davies, who sold all her jewelry, stocks and bonds to raise the cash for him. Davies also managed to raise him another million as a loan from Washington Herald owner Cissy Patterson. The trustee cut Hearst's annual salary to $500,000, and stopped the annual payment of $700,000 in dividends. He had to pay rent for living in his castle at San Simeon.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Legally Hearst avoided bankruptcy, although the public generally saw it as such as appraisers went through the tapestries, paintings, furniture, silver, pottery, buildings, autographs, jewelry, and other collectibles. Items in the thousands were gathered from a five-story warehouse in New York, warehouses near San Simeon containing large amounts of Greek sculpture and ceramics, and the contents of St. Donat's. His collections were sold off in a series of auctions and private sales in 1938–39. John D. Rockefeller, Junior, bought $100,000 of antique silver for his new museum at Colonial Williamsburg. The market for art and antiques had not recovered from the depression, so Hearst made an overall loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars. During this time, Hearst's friend George Loorz commented sarcastically: "He would like to start work on the outside pool [at San Simeon], start a new reservoir etc. but told me yesterday 'I want so many things but haven't got the money.' Poor fellow, let's take up a collection."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: He was embarrassed in early 1939 when "Time" magazine published a feature which revealed he was at risk of defaulting on his mortgage for San Simeon and losing it to his creditor and publishing rival, Harry Chandler. This, however, was averted, as Chandler agreed to extend the repayment.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: After the disastrous financial losses of the 1930s, the Hearst Company returned to profitability during the Second World War, when advertising revenues skyrocketed. Hearst, after spending much of the war at his estate of Wyntoon, returned to San Simeon full-time in 1945 and resumed building works. He also continued collecting, on a reduced scale. He threw himself into philanthropy by donating a great many works to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In 1947, Hearst left his San Simeon estate to seek medical care, which was unavailable in the remote location. He died in Beverly Hills on August 14, 1951, at the age of 88. He was interred in the Hearst family mausoleum at the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California, which his parents had established.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: His will established two charitable trusts, the Hearst Foundation and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation. By his amended will, Marion Davies inherited 170,000 shares in the Hearst Corporation, which, combined with a trust fund of 30,000 shares that Hearst had established for her in 1950, gave her a controlling interest in the corporation. This was short-lived, as she relinquished the 170,000 shares to the Corporation on October 30, 1951, retaining her original 30,000 shares and a role as an advisor. Like their father, none of Hearst's five sons graduated from college. They all followed their father into the media business, and Hearst's namesake, William Randolph, Jr., became a Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper reporter.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: In the 1890s, the already existing anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism in San Francisco were further fanned by Hearst's anti-non-European descents, which were reflected in the rhetoric and the focus in The Examiner and one of his own signed editorials. These prejudices continued to be the mainstays throughout his journalistic career to galvanize his readers’ fears. Hearst staunchly supported the Japanese-American internment during WWII and used his media power to demonize Japanese-Americans and to drum up support for the internment of Japanese-Americans.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Some media outlets have attempted to bring attention to Hearst's involvement in the prohibition of cannabis in America. Hearst collaborated with Harry J. Anslinger to ban hemp due to the threat that the burgeoning hemp paper industry posed to his major investment and market share in the paper milling industry. Due to their efforts, hemp would remain illegal to grow in the US for almost a century, not being legalized until 2018.


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: As Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted in their 1990 book "Unreliable Sources," Hearst "routinely invented sensational stories, faked interviews, ran phony pictures and distorted real events". This approach discredited "yellow journalism".


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: Hearst's use of yellow journalism techniques in his "New York Journal" to whip up popular support for U.S. military adventurism in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898 was also criticized in Upton Sinclair's 1919 book, "The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism." According to Sinclair, Hearst's newspapers distorted world events and deliberately tried to discredit Socialists. Another critic, Ferdinand Lundberg, extended the criticism in "Imperial Hearst" (1936), charging that Hearst papers accepted payments from abroad to slant the news. After the war, a further critic, George Seldes, repeated the charges in "Facts and Fascism" (1947). Lundberg described Hearst "the weakest strong man and the strongest weak man in the world today... a giant with feet of clay."


title: William Randolph Hearst

text: The film "Citizen Kane" (released on May 1, 1941) is loosely based on Hearst's life. Welles and his collaborator, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, created Kane as a composite character, among them Harold Fowler McCormick, Samuel Insull and Howard Hughes. Hearst, enraged at the idea of "Citizen Kane" being a thinly disguised and very unflattering portrait of him, used his massive influence and resources to prevent the film from being released—all without even having seen it. Welles and the studio RKO Pictures resisted the pressure but Hearst and his Hollywood friends ultimately succeeded in pressuring theater chains to limit showings of "Citizen Kane", resulting in only moderate box-office numbers and seriously impairing Welles's career prospects. The fight over the film was documented in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, "The Battle Over Citizen Kane", and nearly 60 years later, HBO offered a fictionalized version of Hearst's efforts in its original production "RKO 281" (1999), in which James Cromwell portrays Hearst. "Citizen Kane" has twice been ranked No. 1 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies: in 1998 and 2007. In 2020, David Fincher directed "Mank", starring Gary Oldman as Mankiewicz, as he interacts with Hearst prior to the writing of "Citizen Kane"'s screenplay. Charles Dance portrays Hearst in the film.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Jerome Hayden "Jay" Powell (born February 4, 1953) is an American attorney and investment banker who has served as the 16th chair of the Federal Reserve since 2018.


title: Jerome Powell

text: After earning a degree in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, he moved to investment banking in 1984, and worked for several financial institutions, including as a partner of The Carlyle Group. In 1992, Powell briefly served as under secretary of the Treasury for domestic finance under President George H. W. Bush. Powell left Carlyle Group in 2005 and founded Severn Capital Partners, a private investment firm. He was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center from 2010 to 2012, before returning to public service.


title: Jerome Powell

text: He became a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors after being nominated to the post by President Barack Obama in 2012, he was subsequently elevated to chairman by President Donald Trump (succeeding Janet Yellen), and renominated to the position by President Joe Biden.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Powell built his reputation in Washington during the Obama administration as a consensus-builder and problem-solver.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Powell received bipartisan praise for the actions taken by the Federal Reserve in early 2020 to combat the financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Federal Reserve continued to apply high levels of monetary stimulus to further raise asset prices and support growth, some observers perceived a disconnect between asset prices and the economy. Powell has responded by arguing that supporting the Fed's dual mandate of stable prices and full employment outweighed concern over high asset prices. "Time" said the scale and manner of Powell's actions had "changed the Fed forever" and shared concerns that he had conditioned Wall Street to unsustainable levels of monetary stimulus to artificially support high asset prices. In November 2020, "Bloomberg News" called Powell "Wall Street's Head of State," as a reflection of how dominant Powell's actions were on asset prices and how profitable his actions were for Wall Street.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Nearing the end of his first year in the White House, President Biden nominated Powell for a second term as Federal Reserve Chair, and the Senate Banking Committee approved of his renomination with only one dissenting vote; he was confirmed to a second term in an 80-19 vote on May 12, 2022. Following President Biden's renomination of Powell, the Fed Chairman retired his previous words "transitory inflation", and indicated a reduction in Quantitative easing (QE) and Mortgage-backed security (MBS) purchases due to high inflation, with the CPI reading in November 2021 having reached 6.8% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest level in 40 years.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Powell was born on February 4, 1953, in Washington, D.C., as one of six children to Patricia (née Hayden; 1926–2010) and Jerome Powell (1921–2007), a lawyer in private practice. His maternal grandfather, James J. Hayden, was Dean of the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America and later a lecturer at Georgetown Law School. He has five siblings: Susan, Matthew, Tia, Libby, and Monica.


title: Jerome Powell

text: In 1972, Powell graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit university-preparatory school. He received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton University in 1975, where his senior thesis was titled ""South Africa: Forces for Change"". In 1975–76, he spent a year as a legislative assistant to Republican Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Powell earned a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, where he was editor-in-chief of the "Georgetown Law Journal".


title: Jerome Powell

text: In 1979, Powell moved to New York City and became a clerk to Judge Ellsworth Van Graafeiland of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 1981 to 1983, Powell was a lawyer with Davis Polk & Wardwell, and from 1983 to 1984, he worked at the firm of Werbel & McMillen.


title: Jerome Powell

text: From 1984 to 1990, Powell worked at Dillon, Read & Co., an investment bank, where he concentrated on financing, merchant banking, and mergers and acquisitions, rising to the position of vice president.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Between 1990 and 1993, Powell worked in the United States Department of the Treasury, at which time Nicholas F. Brady, the former chairman of Dillon, Read & Co., was the United States Secretary of the Treasury. In 1992, Powell became the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance after being nominated by George H. W. Bush. During his stint at the Treasury, Powell oversaw the investigation and sanctioning of Salomon Brothers after one of its traders submitted false bids for a United States Treasury security. Powell was also involved in the negotiations that made Warren Buffett the chairman of Salomon.


title: Jerome Powell

text: In 1993, Powell began working as a managing director for Bankers Trust. He left in 1995 after the bank suffered irreparable reputational damage when some complex derivative transactions caused large losses for major corporate clients. He then went back to work for Dillon, Read & Co. From 1997 to 2005, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group, where he founded and led the Industrial Group within the Carlyle U.S. Buyout Fund. After leaving Carlyle, Powell founded Severn Capital Partners, a private investment firm focused on specialty finance and opportunistic investments in the industrial sector. In 2008, Powell became a managing partner of the Global Environment Fund, a private equity and venture capital firm that invests in sustainable energy.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Between 2010 and 2012, Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., where he worked on getting Congress to raise the United States debt ceiling during the United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011. Powell presented the implications to the economy and interest rates of a default or a delay in raising the debt ceiling. He worked for a salary of $1 per year.


title: Jerome Powell

text: In December 2011, along with Jeremy C. Stein, Powell was nominated to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by President Barack Obama. The nomination included two people to help garner bipartisan support for both nominees since Stein's nomination had previously been filibustered. Powell's nomination was the first time that a president nominated a member of the opposition party for such a position since 1988. He took office on May 25, 2012, to fill the unexpired term of Frederic Mishkin, who resigned. In January 2014, he was nominated for another term, and, in June 2014, he was confirmed by the United States Senate in a 67–24 vote for a 14-year term ending January 31, 2028.


title: Jerome Powell

text: Powell was a skeptic of round 3 of quantitative easing (or QE3), initiated in September 2012, although he eventually voted for it.


title: Jerome Powell

text: In 2013 Powell endorsed financial regulation to end the problem of institutions that are too big to fail, while urging that it should be implemented carefully. In April 2017, he took over oversight of the "too big to fail" banks.


title: Jerome Powell

text: In a July 2017 speech, Powell said that in regard to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the status quo is "unacceptable" and that the current situation "may feel comfortable, but it is also unsustainable". He warned that "the next few years may present our last best chance" to "address the ultimate status of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" and avoid "repeating the mistakes of the past". Powell expressed concerns that, in the current situation, the government is responsible for mortgage defaults and that lending standards were too rigid, noting that these can be solved by encouraging "ample amounts of private capital to support housing finance activities".


title: Jerome Powell

text: In an October 2017 speech, Powell stated that higher capital and liquidity requirements and stress tests from the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act have made the financial system safer and must be preserved. However, he also stated that the Volcker Rule should be re-written to exclude smaller banks.


title: Jerome Powell

text: On November 2, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Powell to serve as the chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen at the helm of the central bank. On December 5, the Senate Banking Committee approved Powell's nomination to be chair in a 22–1 vote, with Senator Elizabeth Warren casting the lone dissenting vote. His nomination was confirmed by the Senate on January 23, 2018, by an 84–13 vote. Powell assumed office as chair on February 5, 2018.


title: Jerome Powell

text: One of Powell's first actions was to continue to raise US interest rates, as a response to the increasing strength of the US economy. He also announced that the Fed would reduce its asset portfolio from US$4.5 trillion to a range of US$2.5–3 trillion over four years in a process called quantitative tightening. This tight policy drew public criticism from President Trump, who expressed second thoughts about nominating Powell and said that the chair was too enthusiastic about raising rates. Financial assets of all classes declined over 2018 and markets erupted in volatility in December. Powell abandoned quantitative tightening in early 2019, leading to a recovery in asset prices. Trump continued to state, with increasing hostility, that Powell was not reacting quickly enough. As a trade war with China escalated over the summer of 2019, Trump called the Fed's policies "insane" and labelled Powell an "enemy." He privately discussed with White House counsel the possibility of firing Powell, which Powell dismissed. In an August interview, Trump said that he completely disagreed with Powell's approach and called for a sharp cut in interest rates.


title: Jerome Powell

text: In October 2019, as asset prices waned, Powell announced the Fed would return to expanding its balance sheet, which led to a global rally in assets. Powell said the Fed's actions were not quantitative easing, but some dubbed them as being QE4. Where Bernanke-era quantitative was conducted through outright purchases of assets, Powell's expansion operates through overnight repurchase agreements (repos) where the seller has the option to reverse the transaction. The Fed's primary dealers and other banks use the repo facilities to sell Treasury and agency securities in exchange for credit to supplement their cash on hand.


title: Jerome Powell

text: In early 2020, Powell launched an unprecedented series of actions to counter the financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included a dramatic expansion of the Fed's balance sheet and introduction of new tools, including the direct purchase of corporate bonds, and direct lending programs. Powell emphasized "monetary policy" alone without an equivalent "fiscal policy" response from Congress would widen income inequality. Powell's actions earned him bi-partisan praise, including from Trump, who told Fox News that he was "very happy with his performance" and that "over the last period of six months, he's really stepped up to the plate".


title: Jerome Powell

text: On November 19, 2020, after disagreeing with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Powell agreed to return unused crisis funds to the United States Treasury. Both he and Mnuchin then urged Congress to approve more stimulus.


title: Jerome Powell

text: To mitigate the financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell accepted asset price inflation as a consequence of Fed policy actions. Powell was criticized for using high levels of direct and indirect quantitative easing as valuations hit levels last seen at the peaks of previous bubbles.


title: Jerome Powell

text: The Fed's acceptance of asset price inflation from 2019 onwards resulted in levels of wealth inequality not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Fed asset purchases were also seen as contributing to the K-shaped recovery that emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, where the asset bubbles protected the wealthier segments of society from the financial effects of the pandemic, at the expense of most other segments, and particularly on the younger non-asset owning segments such as millennials. In January 2021, Edward Luce of the "Financial Times" warned that the Fed's use of asset purchases, and the resultant widening of wealth inequality, could lead to political and social instability in the United States, saying: "The majority of people are suffering amid a Great Gatsby-style boom at the top".


title: Jerome Powell

text: Powell's expansion of credit through repo contracts, seen as a new "Greenspan put," created large profits for Wall Street investment banks. In June 2020, Jim Grant likened Powell's policy to drug dealing, calling him "the Fed's Dr. Feelgood." In a September 2020 testimony, Powell said: "Our actions were in no way an attempt to relieve pain on Wall Street". By the end of 2020, Wall Street investment banks recorded their best year in history, and "Bloomberg" called 2020, ".. a great year for Wall Street, but a bear market for Humans". Mohamed A. El-Erian called Powell "a follower, not a leader", of markets.