Sloan was born in Brooklyn, New York and is a 1966 graduate of Brooklyn College and a 1967 graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He attended the Jewish Theological Seminary for two years while he was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College. He is a veteran journalist who worked at Newsweek before being hired by Fortune, and has spoken about the economy on TV shows such as Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report and regularly on American Public Media's Marketplace found on NPR. In 2008, Sloan won the Gerald Loeb Award for the seventh time. The prize was given for his story "House of Junk", which showed how subprime mortgages went bad.