Number of words: 929<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nathan Tankus, 28, hasn\u2019t finished his bachelor\u2019s degree at New York City\u2019s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has, however, mastered enough knowledge of economics and finance to become a widely followed commentator on the Federal Reserve. A newsletter he launched this year has followers at the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Department of the Treasury. He\u2019s also followed on Twitter by journalists, economic think-tankers, and Wall Street economists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tankus built an online following slowly since around 2015, but it\u2019s only in the past year that he\u2019s broadened his audience with deep dives into monetary mechanics. In September he diagnosed the dislocations in the secured lending market that forced the Fed to resume buying Treasury bonds on a massive scale. This year he wrote a series of detailed posts called Notes on the Crises, which explained the Fed\u2019s emergency actions to combat the Covid-19 recession. He made extensive use of T-accounts, a tool of accountants that places assets on the left and liabilities on the right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe has really good knowledge of the plumbing of the monetary system,\u201d says David Beckworth, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tankus\u2019s diploma-free rise is interesting in part for what it says about the economic and finance debates taking place on the internet. Establishment credentials matter there less than ever. Tankus has taken full advantage of the lack of gatekeepers on the web, where a sharp and quickly delivered argument on the topic du jour\u2014whatever that may be\u2014can have more impact than a peer-reviewed article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, say, or the American Economic Review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody is more surprised by his newfound fame than Tankus himself, who can finally afford to move out of the family apartment in Manhattan where he grew up. \u201cIt\u2019s been a completely amazing, strange experience,\u201d Tankus says. The newsletter, with 450 subscribers, is netting him $45,000 a year, and he thinks he can earn an additional $20,000 from other speaking and writing engagements. \u201cThis has turned into a comfortably full-paying career,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd there\u2019s a lot of room to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tankus was attending the Urban Academy Laboratory High School in Manhattan in 2008 and 2009 when his teachers made the financial crisis into a teachable moment. During his summer vacation in 2009 he tackled A Monetary History of the United States, a magisterial work by the conservative economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. Soon after, he picked up The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by the liberal John Maynard Keynes. \u201cI kept reading it again and again until I had a handle on it,\u201d he says. He was still in high school when he was exposed to the financial instability hypothesis of Hyman Minsky and to Modern Monetary Theory, which was just getting going as a movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Earning a college degree didn\u2019t come as easily. He spent his freshman year at Wells College in upstate New York, then transferred to the University of Ottawa to study with a pair of post-Keynesian economists, Marc Lavoie and Marco Seccareccia. He says he had \u201cfinancial aid issues that prevented me from being successful there,\u201d so he returned to New York and studied at John Jay, part of the City University of New York, with the leftist economist J.W. Mason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But he hasn\u2019t yet gotten his diploma\u2014which he needs before he can do what he wants to do next, namely study for a Ph.D. in law at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Why law? \u201cI got to a certain point where I realized these debates about the origins of money and so on couldn\u2019t be settled within economics. There are legal and historical questions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tankus understands his niche in the ecosystem of economics. Akin to journalism, it\u2019s about writing the first draft of history. \u201cI\u2019m writing a lot when other people aren\u2019t necessarily putting things out there,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can be a great academic, but if you\u2019re not writing all the time you\u2019re not necessarily in people\u2019s minds as someone they would want to ask a question to. I write so much that there\u2019s always something for people to pick up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the Fed began announcing a series of extraordinary measures to rescue the U.S. economy, Tankus wrote 21 long pieces in 31 days. \u201cSometimes that meant staying up until 5 or 6 a.m.,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was unbelievable breakneck speed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His posts earned the attention not only of people who share his liberal views, but of ones who just wanted to understand the nuts and bolts of what the Fed was doing. His Twitter followers include reporters from Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times; Peter Orszag, a former Obama administration official who\u2019s the chief executive officer of financial advisory at the investment bank Lazard; and Alan Cole, a senior economist to Republicans on Congress\u2019s Joint Economic Committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe speak a common language, maybe come to different conclusions,\u201d says Beckworth, the George Mason economist, who describes his own politics as right of center. \u201cHe will always give you a smart, informed answer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a time when a lot of social media has become an echo chamber where people go to hear from people they already agree with, it\u2019s encouraging that there are still places where disagreements can be thrashed out\u2014and credentialism is pushed aside. Says Tankus: \u201cWe\u2019ve kind of stretched the space for gatekeepers in economics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n