The 1970s saw a growth of pages covering financial and business news in USA media. By the end of the decade all metropolitan newspapers carried business sections and had significantly increased their specialist staff in the subject. The motive for this expansion was anxiety. If the 1960s can be sketched as an age of social and cultural shock, the 1970s were years of economic shock: rising inflation and failing purchasing power, loss of competitiveness and de-industrialization, and international monetary turbulence. Against this backdrop, a radical movement of economists found a second calling in journalism. With a first issue in November 1974, Dollars and Sense, a monthly bulletin of economic affairs, was the project of the Union of Radical Political Economics. Its stated mission to ‘offer clear and concise interpretations of current economic events from a socialist perspective.’ Dollars and Sense had personal and intellectual ties with the New York based Monthly Review, another magazine of socialist interpretation. However in format and content Dollars and Sense was always closer to the underground press of the sixties. The magazine was intended as a tool for activism. It carried the conviction that a discourse that was economically informed could also be politically compelling and responsive to the demands of advocacy. My paper examines how Dollars and Sense sought to accomplish a connection to its imagined public, and what answers to the questions of the day emerged from its outreach.