28-yr-old with no degree is a must-read on economy now
Nathan Tankus, 28, hasn't finished his bachelor's degree at New York City's 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's also followed on Twitter by journalists, economic thinktankers, and Wall Street economists.
Tankus built an online following slowly from around 2015, but it's only in the past year that he's 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
Nathan Tankus
bonds on a massive scale.
This year he wrote a series of detailed posts called Notes on the Crises, which explained the Fed's emergency actions to combat the Covid-19 recession. He made extensive use of Taccounts, a tool of accountants that places assets on the left and liabilities on the right.
"He has really good knowledge of the plumbing of the monetary system," says David Beckworth, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University.
Tankus's 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-whatever that may be-can have more impact than a peerreviewed article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, say, or the American Economic Review.
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. "It's been a completely amazing, strange experience," 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. "This has turned into a comfortably fullpaying career," he says. "And there's a lot of room to grow."
—Bloomberg