Monday, December 01, 2008
Gone but not forgotten
Readers of the excellent Calculated Risk blog will be saddened to learn that co-blogger Tanta has passed. From the New York Times:
Calculated Risk has posted as well here, where hundreds of fans have left comments.
For my own part, I stumbled on to the CR blog back in the summer of 2007 and immediately became a daily reader. Tanta's writing on the mortgage industry was indespensible when trying to navigate various unworkable government proposals on fixing the mortgage crisis and shoddy reporting from ignorant financial journalists. She wrote long, highly detailed posts on arcane subjects with flair and humor, and her passing is a great loss for those who seek understanding of the circumstances that led to the credit crisis, and how it might eventually be resolved. If you have somehow missed her writing, I strongly encourage anyone interested in these topics to peruse her archived posts at Calculated Risk.
The blogger Tanta, an influential voice on the mortgage collapse, died Sunday morning in Columbus, Ohio.
Tanta, who wrote for Calculated Risk, a finance and economics blog, was a pseudonym for Doris Dungey, 47, who until recently had lived in Upper Marlboro, Md. The cause of death was ovarian cancer, her sister, Cathy Stickelmaier, said.
Thanks in large part to Tanta’s contributions, Calculated Risk became a crucial source of prescient analysis as the housing market at first faltered, then collapsed and finally spawned a full-blown credit crisis.
Tanta used her extensive knowledge of the loan industry to comment, castigate and above all instruct. Her fans ranged from the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times who cited her in his blog, to analysts at the Federal Reserve, who cited her in a paper on “Understanding the Securitization of Subprime Mortgage Credit.”
Calculated Risk has posted as well here, where hundreds of fans have left comments.
For my own part, I stumbled on to the CR blog back in the summer of 2007 and immediately became a daily reader. Tanta's writing on the mortgage industry was indespensible when trying to navigate various unworkable government proposals on fixing the mortgage crisis and shoddy reporting from ignorant financial journalists. She wrote long, highly detailed posts on arcane subjects with flair and humor, and her passing is a great loss for those who seek understanding of the circumstances that led to the credit crisis, and how it might eventually be resolved. If you have somehow missed her writing, I strongly encourage anyone interested in these topics to peruse her archived posts at Calculated Risk.
1 Comments:
By 
Noumenon, at
Tue Dec 02, 11:13:00 PM:
Her collection of posts for UberNerds is super, I read "Negative Amortization" and "Mortgage Origination Channels."
