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shampson@globeandmail.com

Ali Velshi thinks of himself as a fireman. And the house that's burning? The world economy.

The chief business correspondent on CNN has watched his star rise as the economy has plummeted. But he recognizes that his celebrity comes with responsibility.

"The perfect example was the week [in October] when the bailout vote failed," the Toronto-raised journalist says on the phone from the CNN newsroom in Atlanta. "The Dow was off more than 700 points. It was very difficult for us to compute this, to sit there and think, 'We have never seen this kind of remarkable reaction.' It's the kind of thing that would suggest the machines were broken or that the computers were broken. It seemed so unusual, and in order to do that live on TV, broadcasting it, keeping your own adrenalin under control, you're definitely communicating that this is very, very important, but you cannot panic."

Which is where his firefighter analogy comes in.

"You can't not take the fire seriously, but you can't be running out there like this is out of control and you've never seen it and you don't know what to do. You may not have seen it [coming]. But people are looking to you to say, 'Can you handle this?' So we have to come across with a tone that says, 'Well, folks, this is pretty big, but we have the tools to figure this out.' Because if they see us panic, they panic."

The "management of tone" has been the "biggest challenge" says the journalist once mocked as "the hairless prophet of doom" by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. "The louder it gets outside, the quieter our tone needs to get," he explains.

Still, he admits to being "an intense, caffeinated guy, which 90 per cent of the time works for me on TV."

Mr. Velshi suits the CNN style of outsized television personality. Along with Anderson Cooper, Larry King, Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs, among others, he is as noteworthy as the news. And like some of the network's biggest stars, he has been made by the events of the world. (Who could forget Aaron Brown, the reporter who covered 9/11 from a Manhattan rooftop on his first day on the job with CNN? He became a celebrity at the network with his own news program until supplanted by Mr. Cooper, who came into his own with his empathetic coverage of Hurricane Katrina.)

With his polished dome, designer glasses, and uniform of three-piece pinstriped dark suit with crisp shirt and colourful tie, does Mr. Velshi think of his on-air persona as that of a Wall Street banker?

"I'm not sure," he muses. "When you say that, I think of reserved and aloof, and I'm neither of those."

A hedge fund manager, perhaps?

"Maybe that's more like it," he says, laughing. "It's aggressive. It's enthusiastic. I am wildly optimistic about most things. ... And I want people not to get lost and not see the woods for the trees because they're focused on bad things that are happening."

His persona is not calculated, he insists. "My three-piece suits started in Toronto," he says, but he admits that recent purchases reinforce his signature look.

Born in Nairobi to Indian parents, he and his elder sister and parents moved to Toronto when he was a year old. After graduating from Queen's University in Kingston with a degree in religion, the 39-year-old moved into journalism, working as a booking producer at Canada AM, a general news reporter at CFTO, business anchor for Cable Pulse 24 and CITY-TV, and by 1999, a host at ROBtv. He joined CNN in 2001.

He chose business journalism "because I thought it would be a nice life - no nights and weekends," he jokes. "The reality is they needed someone to do it. I had something of an interest in business, and they had people who could teach me what I needed to know."

When he moved to CNN, the need to explain the ins and outs of the business world - the strength of his journalism, he believes - was an obvious niche. "When I got here and looked at the American health-care system, I thought, 'I'm a relatively smart guy and I really don't understand how this works.' And I looked at the 401K system for retirement ... and I found that a little bit complicated."

The economic collapse revealed the ignorance many people had about both personal finance and larger economic issues. "I think the system has not been built for people to have great economic literacy," he says, adding that the media has to fill in the knowledge gap as well as schools. The leading audience response to his broadcasts, he says, is "Thanks for the explanations, for the context."

His ascendancy at the network began at the end of 2007, when economic deterioration started and the American electorate focused on its importance in the run-up to the presidential election. "What we realized is that we so effectively deployed resources to cover politics - such that 'CNN equals politics' became an accepted idea. So we wanted 'CNN equals money,' and we had the resources to do it."

The decision lengthened his working day into as much as 20 hours at the height of the financial crisis. With his multi-platform presence - which also includes podcasts, a blog, radio, his own website and Twitter updates - he says he rarely works less than 12 hours a day. In his office in the New York CNN bureau, where he is based, he has a small IKEA bed. In October, he will marry Lori Wachs, a portfolio manager from Philadelphia, whom he met when she was a guest on his show.

The only drawback to his celebrity, he says, is that people see him as an expert who will dispense advice. "I still cringe when anyone at CNN or otherwise refers to me as an expert on anything." He prefers to think of himself as a journalist.

But doesn't his book, Gimme Back My Money, The Financial Crisis and What You Can Do About It, create an image of him as the expert he doesn't want to be?

"Everything I do and write is grounded in sourced fact to the standards that CNN requires," he says with some defensiveness. "I don't say things on TV that are not grounded and defensible in fact, and that makes me a journalist." The book, which was completed in forty days from inception to publication, is available only in paperback in an effort to make it inexpensive and accessible for people, he says. "The overwhelming benefit [to others] of writing that book is greater than my concern that I would be referred to as an expert."

But do people still stop him on the street to ask what they should do?

"Always," he says.

What does he suggest?

"Understand the market. Don't ask about stock tips."