December 03, 2008

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."

She wrote under a pseudonym because she hoped some day to go back to work in the mortgage industry, and the increasing renown of Tanta in that world might have precluded that. Tanta was Ms. Dungey's longtime family nickname, Stickelmaier said.Calculated Risk, which gets about 75,000 visitors a day, was started in early 2005 by a retired technology executive named Bill McBride. The housing market was soaring, but McBride sensed that the industry was about to peak, and he posted articles and data that made his case.The blog quickly drew a lively and informed group of commentators, few livelier and none more informed than someone who called herself Tanta. She began by correcting some of McBride's posts. "She would tell me either I was wrong or the article I was quoting was wrong," he said Sunday. "It was clear she really knew her stuff. And she was funny about it."