What Brad DeLong Said: Rest in Peace Doris Dungey, "Tanta"

UPDATE: For those who read here and not at CR, a link for Donations.

We knew she was home with her family, but it was over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday…

Calculated Risk:

Sad News: Tanta Passes Away: My dear friend and co-blogger Doris “Tanta” Dungey passed away early this morning. I would like to express my deepest condolences to her family and friends…

Tanta was one of the people—along with CR, PGL, DeLong, and Mark Thoma (and probably a few others I’ve overlooked, such as Max Sawicky**)—who proved early on that long, informative blog posts about issues that might be considered arcane* could find an audience.*** Including people who knew what you were talking about and could provide complementary insights and information.

Via CR, David Streitfeld sums it up:

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.”

There are a lot of people out there who are saying now that “we all knew there would be a crisis.” Tanta is one of the main reasons for that.

She will be is missed.

*Robert Waldmann’s investigative series on Credit Products is a current AB example.

**The lack of conservative economists on the list is not my fault; the Mankiws and Tyler Cowens of the world rarely if ever go into detail about the system or the implications surrounding their statements.

***UPDATE: See the Ubernerd posts, collected here.