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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. She is currently on leave.
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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.
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No Parting from TARP

By Megan McArdle

Apr 20 2009, 2:51 PM ET Comment

I've been expecting this for a while:  Treasury isn't going to let the banks pay back TARP money unless it damn well feels like it.



I'm not clear what the point is.  At this point, everyone knows which of the systemically important institutions can probably repay the money, and which of them can't.  Perhaps the idea is to keep Goldman from carrying out its purported plan to bust the compensation caps and thereby poach top talent from the other firms.

On the other hand, this seems certain to discourage financial institutions from participating in any future Treasury programs.  Once you take the King's Shilling, apparently you've enlisted for life--and your Congressional drill sergeants reserve the right to change the rules of your employment at will.

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