About me

I grew up in Durham, North Carolina and began college at Mary Baldwin University’s Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. After transferring to Duke University, where I co-founded the co-ed a cappella group Rhythm & Blue, I graduated with a degree in classical languages and a hardcore newspaper habit from writing and editing for The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper.

After college, I wrote for newspapers in Atlanta, Georgia; Burlington, North Carolina; Martinsburg, West Virginia; and Bend, Oregon. Then I moved to Texas to study public policy and political economics at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. My Washington journalism career began with an internship at the Financial Times.

I joined Dow Jones Newswires/the Wall Street Journal in January, 2001, working out of the U.S. Treasury press room, where I was on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The events of that day, and the subsequent shocks to the country and the bond market, have informed my reporting and policy work ever since. While in the press room, I was part of the Treasury’s efforts to automate debt auction results rather than distribute them through the press room, and I coordinated the release of Federal Reserve interest rate decisions during the pre-press conference era. At DJ/WSJ, I also spent three years reporting on the Pentagon and defense procurement.

At DJ/WSJ, I also spent three years reporting on the Pentagon and defense procurement, and in 2007, I was named to the TJFR Group/NewsBios 30 Under 30 list of up-and-coming business journalists. That website no longer exists, but if you want to see the rest of my class, click here. 

After a brief stint writing about the Fed for Market News International, I landed at Bloomberg News covering the Treasury again, just in time for the global financial crisis. In 2011, I moved to the Bloomberg Brussels bureau, just in time for the euro crisis to hit its stride. In 2016, reluctant to take my chances with another big move, I left daily journalism.

Over the past decade, I have established myself as one of Brussels’ clearest voices on financial stability, the evolution of European markets, and transatlantic politics. I have worked inside and outside European institutions and, since 2019, have been affiliated with Bruegel, the independent economic policy think tank, alongside other work and commitments. Since September 2022, I have written the Brussels Briefing column for Internationale Politik Quarterly, the English-language magazine of the German Foreign Affairs Council (DGAP), and from December 2022 to June 2024, I was the Europe columnist for Reuters Breakingviews.

In 2024, I spent five months as a senior economist at the European Central Bank in the office of European Institutions and Fora, working on retail savings and capital markets union policy. I have done contract work for the European Commission, including editing the first chapter of the 2022 report by the High Level Group on post-COVID economic and social challenges, and served as an expert adviser to the European Economic and Social Committee. At the European Stability Mechanism, I was the lead author on their official history book. I have regularly offered testimony and research insights to the European Parliament, and periodically contributed to the International Monetary Fund’s Finance & Development magazine.