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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Dollar obsessions

By Megan McArdle
Sep 23 2008, 5:56 PM ET Comment

One answer to my question "what do you mean by worse" is that the value of the dollar will fall.  I'm not sure why I'm supposed to be so excited by this.  Yes, I love my Panasonic television.  But with 90% of our production bought and sold domestically, the value of the dollar is of limited relevance to the fate of the economy, or the living standards of most Americans.  And some of our biggest trading partners seem pretty determined to stop the dollar from falling against their currency By Any Means Necessary.  I am sad that I will not be able to vacation cheaply in Europe.  But this does not seem like a good reason to urge a double-digit contraction in output.

Of course, a falling dollar also may make it harder to borrow abroad.  On the other hand, even the treasury doesn't, mostly.  Besides, the people who are intensely concerned with the dollar's exchange rate don't want us to borrow abroad, so I'm not sure why this is supposed to be more important than preventing the next Great Depression.

Currency crises are huge problems in countries where foreigners are the main source of capital, and profligate governments are forced to borrow in their own currencies.  But we are not one of those countries.

What am I missing?


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