Brendan is a PhD student in the Department of History specializing in the history of money and finance, particularly in the early-modern Atlantic world. His research focuses on how different kinds of high-powered and petty money circulated in the same markets, how the production and regulation of money affected economic inequality, and on how early-modern flows of African, Brazilian and Andean gold and silver changed economic thought. He is writing a history of the dollar for Penguin Random House. 

Brendan comes to Princeton after 20 years as a journalist, covering economic and monetary policy. He was the US economics editor at the Financial Times, and continues to write a regular column there. Before that, he was a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Economist, as well as an anchor and correspondent for Bloomberg TV. He has also written for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal Europe, and received a New York Press Club Award for special event reporting in 2012. Brendan graduated from Tulane University with honors in German in 1997.