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Jim McTague has been the Washington Editor of Barron’s since January, 1994. He covers the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street, the most accident-prone cross-street in the entire world. Jim is a credentialed White House correspondent and he frequents Capitol Hill.
He has been a journalist since 1972—except for a three-year-hiatus when he worked at Merrill Lynch in Harrisburg, Pa. to take advantage of the firm’s storied training program. With that financial experience under his belt, Jim covered the Savings and Loan Crisis, in succession, for the Dallas Times-Herald; American Banker Newspaper; and USA Today.
He is keenly interested in the Rube Goldberg architecture of the U.S. securities markets, which makes them vulnerable to trading snafus like the Flash Crash of May, 2010. In 2011, he wrote “Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market into a Casino,” published by FT Press, which traces the evolution of the market from a venue where investment capital was funneled to promising enterprises to one where robots employing mathematical hocus-pocus make huge, short-term market bets at the speed of light to the detriment of long-term investors.
Jim received a BS in English from Saint Joseph’s university, Philadelphia, Pa., in 1971. He received an MA in English from The Pennsylvania State University in 1972.