Today bloggers lost one of our own, one of the best in our class... Doris "Tanta" Dungey has died this morning of Ovarian Cancer. Tanta wrote for the Calculated Risk blog, and she helped the lot of us (me included) understand the vagaries of mortgage lending practices that led first to the housing bubble, then to the subprime mortgage crisis and the implosion of the housing market, and eventually to the place we find ourselves today -- the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
From the New York Times::
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 goes on to add:
This is a very sad day and I know many of you are in shock. Tanta was our teacher. She generously shared her knowledge with all of us. I doubt she knew how many lives she touched; her insights, spirit and passion lives on in her writings – and in all of you.
Tanta Vive!
To which I can only contribute a quiet thank you to Doris Dungey for helping to enlighten people like me who sought to understand the truth of the thing, that many headed savaged beast that rampaged across the land, consuming our economy and our lives whole, leaving ruin in its wake.
The truth wasn't a very pretty, or very easy, or very pleasant read but god knows we needed to read it. We still need it. And now we'll all have to work a bit harder, stumbling forward in the dark a bit longer, to find the truth in her absence.
Tanta is gone, long live Tanta.