right! It was purely luck because I honestly had no idea what I was talking about, and that made a mark for me. And I stayed in the job sort of as the Chief US Economist, not the Chief Economist, for about 8 years. And then the Chief Economist, who was an old friend of mine from the Fed, retired suddenly, not by choice. And I was then asked to take over and run the economics group as Morgan Stanley’s chief economist. It was the best job I could ever imagine. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. And I did that for about 17 years and right around early 2007 I got a call from my good friend, a guy I’d worked with for 25 years, John Mack who ran Morgan Stanley at the time, and said you want to go to Asia and run our businesses as the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia? And I immediately thought of the fact that there was really no way I could do that and maintain my position as a Chief Economist, so I told John, no, I don’t want to do it. I want to stay in the job that I was born for. And he said well, why don’t you think about it? None of you probably know John Mack, but when he says think about it, it was said with this slightly different inflection, intonation in his voice. And still, I thought about it long and hard, talked to my wife about it, and I decided to give it a roll. And I went out there in early 2007, moved to Hong Kong, family stayed here because I figured out pretty quickly I’d be on the road about 95% of the time flying all over Asia, half my time in China, and it made no sense to disrupt my family and bring them out to Asia. And so I did it, stopped being the Chief Economist, and became at that point the first Wall Street economist who transitioned into a senior banking role and I loved it. It was just, it was
and we’re holding these presentations to 15 minutes on very big topics. And this will be a crucial ingredient in your professional success, to be able to say something big and complicated simply and very quickly. Not to mention be able to field questions. And there’s a term paper, as you know. We take those papers very seriously and one reason we do is that in past years they haven’t been so good. So every year we tighten up a little bit and we are harsher in our assessment and we are expecting a preliminary outline of what you are going to write about by February 10, and when I say preliminary outline it’s at least a page, but that page has to be crystal clear – what is the argument that you’re making and what are you going to use to substantiate it. These papers are not a book report; you’re taking a position on something. And the syllabus has a bunch of topics, any of those is fine. If you want a different topic, you have to get an okay from me or Steve. By all means, pick a different topic, but what we don’t want you to do is to pick one and we don’t know, we haven’t approved it before this outline because every once in a while a student will take a topic that it may be very interesting and have absolutely nothing to do with the course. So we’re trying to avoid that. We’re taking 2 maybe 3 trips to New York and a week-long trip to Washington. They’re almost all set; I think they’re going to be really interesting. And the one thing I want to mention so there are no surprises is that you’re going to have background on everyone we’re going to see. But for every meeting we’re going to have 4 students who are going to be assigned the responsibility of asking a question. And the meetings will