James ( Jim) McTague is a journalist and author who is best known as the Washington Editor and “ DC Current” columnist for Barron’s, The Dow Jones Business and Financial magazine, from 1995 until 2015. He is the only Barron’s journalist ever to be a member of the White House Press Corp. McTague is also remembered for his prescient election predictions, his aggressive coverage of Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the White House, and a hugely controversial cover story on “The Underground Economy,” which estimated that 11 million illegal aliens were living in the U.S. He also made some notable miss- calls, dismissing Donald Trump as the likely GOP nominee in 2016 and predicting a GOP landslide in 2006.
McTague was the only financial journalist who challenged the government’s initial findings about the cause of the stock market’s “flash crash” in 2010. He wrote a book about that unusually destructive event and a history of the robotic trading that engendered the crash called “Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market into a Casino (FT Press, March 2011).
He was a frequent guest on television and radio shows focused on finance and politics and continues to report on the economy for The John Batchelor Show on CBS radio.
In retirement, McTague has self-published three. Martin Boundary mystery thrillers (www.boundarymysteries.com)
During a 37-year career, he worked for numerous newspapers, including American Banker, The Dallas Times Herald, and USA Today. At these three publications, he established himself as one of the top journalists covering the banking an savings and loan crises that rocked the financial world between 1983 and 1995.