Binyamin Appelbaum

Career In 2007, Appelbaum was part of a team of reporters at The Charlotte Observer who helped shed light on the area's high rate of housing foreclosures and questionable sales practices by Beazer Homes USA, one of the United States' largest homebuilders. A profile of his reporting on the subprime mortgage crisis described how in the early phases of the Great Recession Appelbaum "noticed a strange pattern while compiling a list of foreclosed homes in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County—clusters were concentrated in new developments. Appelbaum wondered if faulty loans were behind the trend". series led to investigations of Beazer Homes by the FBI, IRS, SEC, and HUD. Beazer Homes has since stopped making mortgage loans nationwide and stopped building homes in Charlotte, North Carolina. Floyd Norris of The New York Times wrote in 2008 how the Observer series likely brought an end to some of Beazer's practices. The series won a Gerald Loeb Award for Medium Newspapers, a George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in public service.

Appelbaum's November 8, 2018 tweet claiming the term 'gaslighting' was not an "actual English word" sent lookups for the word up 14,000% on Merriam-Webster.com, putting it on their list of trending terms.

The Economists' Hour Appelbaum's first book, The Economists' Hour, was published in September 2019. According to the publisher's summary, Appelbaum's book "traces the rise of the economists, first in the United States and then around the globe, as their ideas reshaped the modern world, curbing government, unleashing corporations and hastening globalization."

Personal life

He has two siblings including Yoni Appelbaum.