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Many students come to Clark unsure of what to study. For Cary Leahey, the right course of study became evident in his very first semester. "The only A plus I got in college was in first-semester Principles of Economics, so I knew I was on to a good thing," says Leahey. After graduating from Clark, he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and served as chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics and as chief financial markets economist at Lehman Brothers. Leahey has also held positions at GM, Data Resources and on White House staffs. In addition, he has appeared as an expert commentator on CBS, BBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox, PBS, Bloomberg and Reuters.
I got a tremendous education out of Clark. I came here because my guidance counselor said, "You will get an in-classroom education that is second to none." And that was an absolute, 100 percent true statement. I got what I came for. Clark got me into a top graduate program, and I had an outstanding grounding in macro economics from Clark professor Attiat Ott. I came from Washington, D.C., where my father worked in economics, so I knew some of the players even before I went to college. More importantly than that, the only A plus I got in college was in first-semester Principles of Economics, so I knew I was on to a good thing. Also, finally, I was also part of a group of students who experienced the worst economy in decades. From 1959 to effectively 1973, the economy did very, very well. So, I knew that economics was an interesting discipline that you could also earn a very good living at.
I effectively work as chief economist in the equities group at Deutsche Bank. You're trying to provide institutional investors who are making choices of what stocks and bonds to pick with the broad business and economic landscape they're facing. Is economic activity strong or weak? Is a recession imminent? Are interest rates going to go down or up? Is inflation going to be higher or lower? Just as an aside, it ends up increasingly being a question of what's happening in China, which is probably the most interesting country in the globe now.
In some sense, you are a window on the broadest view of how the world is operating and make it relative to the institutional investors. For instance, you may determine that interest rates are going to go up three percentage points next year because the Federal Reserve is going to raise them two percentage points and inflation worries are going to add another percentage point above that. You're providing the big picture. Generally, at an investment conference, the first presentation is the economic landscape presentation on which all the other research spins.
The typical economists who work on Wall Street have very similar backgrounds. They basically have the same tool kit from very similar schools, so their analytical tools are the same, and they are studying data which almost entirely comes from the government and a few large trade associations. There's very little surprise that most of the forecasts are tightly grouped around a median, meaning there are very few outlier forecasts. You can make a lot of money with an outlier forecast, but you can also lose a lot of money. And if you lose a lot of money, you're open to lose your position. In a sense, I'm an economic historian because if you run a regression, you're running a fiscal relationship over historical data. The first thing you have to be good at is understanding the past, so you can understand the future. Economics is such a great profession because I'm getting paid to study something that I'd study anyway on a Saturday night. It's the best job in the world. You want to be excited about your work.