Born and raised in Manhattan, first generation American of naturalized parents of English and Italian origin. 

 

Went to nursery and kindergarten at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on the Upper East Side. 

 

Elementary school at Public School 6, where I learned reading/writing and the multiplication/division tables, nothing more, and greatly enjoyed playing “punch ball” in the school yard during lunchtime. Also, flipping baseball cards to the ground and against walls.

 

Played baseball and football with my childhood friend Jim after school in the Central Park “Meadow” off 5th Avenue and 97th Street. As children we watched wonderful TV together on Saturday mornings: The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Gene Autry, Superman, Popeye, The Three Stooges, Amos and Andy (did not find it demeaning at all, rather endearing and great comedy, can’t understand why it is practically “banned” nowadays as politically incorrect). Went to movies together: Danny Kaye and Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis comedies, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Audie Murphy westerns, John Derek’s “Ambush at Tomahawk Gap” with its stunning opening scene (if I remember correctly), and the terrifyingly memorable “Frankenstein’s Daughter”…. Loved the Central Park playground sprinklers in summer, but a big beautiful swimming pool in the park would have been much nicer…. As a child, big Yankees fan, especially of Mickey Mantle, while Jim was a Dodger fan, especially of Duke Snider and Don Drysdale. As an adult, big fan of all the local sports teams, Giants and Jets, Yankees and Mets, Knicks and Nets, and to a lesser extent the Rangers, Islanders, and Devils.

 

Junior High and High School at the Lycee Francais de New York. All courses in French, following France’s curriculum for secondary school. Excellent, very enjoyable school, culturally broadening. 

 

Spent all my childhood and adolescent summers in Europe, at my maternal grandfather’s who retired on the Italian Riviera, and going to the Italian, French, and Swiss Alps with my parents, as well as on drives through France, Spain, Portugal, and England. While in secondary school, various June’s spent in Paris with distant French cousins, wonderful, enlightening, enriching visits. 

 

College: BA degree from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, intellectually very formative; French Major, thesis on Symbolist poetry; Junior Year in Paris, France at Sciences Politiques (1967-68); most enlightening college course was History of Art. Summer job, prior to senior year, at Berlitz School of Languages, Forest Hills location, teaching English, French, and Italian.

 

Graduate school: Law degrees from New York Law School (1978) and the University of Rome, Italy, Faculty of Jurisprudence (1975), thesis on the interpretation of industrial patents. Passed the New York Bar exam in summer of 1978.

 

Worked as summer associate in Rome at Baker & McKenzie (1977), and as junior associate at a major Italian law firm with American multinational clients for one year (1979). 

 

Career change in 1980 from law to portfolio management and economic forecasting in New York City. Perfectly timed the start of the 1982 bull market and the entire 30% stock market collapse in October 1987 caused by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s misguided, illogical, sudden tightening of monetary policy to keep the dollar exchange rate from falling from its overvalued level, the very cause of our record trade deficits. Twenty-five year correspondence with Milton Friedman and Irving Kristol on economic theories and domestic and foreign policy. Extensive correspondence with the country’s top economists, particularly during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Two articles published by The Wall Street Journal, still very relevant today: No Addiction to Foreign Capital, May 3, 1985, which debunked the conventional economic wisdom that the U.S. depends on foreign capital (at the time Japanese capital, today Chinese capital) to finance its budget deficits (over $4 trillion of QE financing by the Federal Reserve after 2010 should finally make this clear to everyone!); and Fed Tightness Boosts Borrowing, February 21, 1986, which explained why Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s excessively restrictive monetary policy was inappropriate and counterproductive. 

 

Interviewed for the position of chief economist at the Commerce Department in January 1989 by Commerce Secretary Mosbacher, but not hired for having criticized prior Fed Chairman Volcker’s excessively tight monetary policy and for having criticized incumbent Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s excessively tight monetary policy, warning that it would slow the economy so much that President Bush would not be reelected in 1992. Both Volcker and Greenspan were considered infallible at the time, consequently my critique was viewed as off-the-wall. 

 

Participated in a 1990/91 American sponsored competition (run by a San Francisco organization) on how Russia could best make the transition from a communist economy to a free market, private enterprise capitalist economy. The essay I submitted warned that the U.S. and IMF advice to Russia was very misguided, just as it had been for Poland a few years earlier. (I did not win the competition.) The misguided advice given to Russia by the U.S. and the IMF was to have a restrictive monetary policy and an artificially strong currency, which was the conventional economic wisdom at the time in the West. The result of implementing that advice was disastrous, leading to uncompetitively priced Russian goods, sky-high unemployment, and a very deep recession. That economic crisis essentially brought Putin to power and great resentment towards the U.S., the belief being that our bad advice was intentional with the goal of greatly weakening Russia. To this day, Putin probably does not realize that the advice was sincere and in good faith, but the result of a flawed understanding of economics by the entire Western economics profession. I also suggested that all of Russia’s state companies be privatized with the shares distributed equally to all Russian citizens. That would have been fair. Instead Russia ended up with oligarchs, and ordinary Russian citizens with nothing.

 

My April 25, 2003 article, How to Keep Iraq from Becoming a Second Iran, proposed that Iraq’s national oil company be privatized with its shares distributed equally to all Iraqi citizens who would then benefit from dividend payouts and directly own their fair share of their nation’s enormous natural resources. That would have eliminated much sectarian violence which was in great part connected with who would control Iraq’s oil wealth. It would also have removed Iraqi suspicions that the U.S. intended to steal Iraq’s oil. The idea was picked up by Henry Kissinger and his associate Paul Bremer, the U.S. senior administrator in Iraq, but unfortunately not implemented. The best way to end the Libyan civil war would also have been for the U.S. to promote/sponsor the privatization of the Libyan national oil company and have its shares equally distributed to each and every Libyan citizen, since the civil war was, and still is, mainly about competing tribes wishing to gain control of Libya’s oil wealth at the expense of other tribes. The fair distribution of Libya’s oil resources directly to Libyan citizens under U.S. auspices would most probably have led to peace and enhanced the U.S.’ reputation in the Arab world. 

 

Fluent in French and Italian, basic German and Spanish. Extensive travel around the world, especially Europe. Closely witnessed the transition from communism to free market economics in Eastern Europe. 

 

As a volunteer: taught economics/investing for one year (2003) to juniors and seniors in various “failing NYC public high schools”; taught French for two years to first graders in a non-profit Harlem school (2003-4); taught economics/investing and constitutional law for one year to inmates at a New York State prison on Staten Island (2005). 

 

The first, and so far the only, proponent of QE-financed tax rebates, a revolutionary tool for fiscal stimulus, as the main form of stimulus.

 

In October 1992, warned in an article picked up by Italy’s top TV talk show that the failure of the euro’s precursor, the EMS, clearly indicated that a common European currency could not work. In fact, the euro, adopted in 2000, has been a disaster, the cause of the long, deep economic crisis with very high unemployment in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. One cannot link nations having very different economic potentials with a common currency. The euro has been appropriate only for Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse. 

 

Warned that President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program would fail. Constant testing is not the solution. The solution is strict class discipline, lots of homework/study hall, and individual tutoring for students having academic difficulty. That’s the only way to prevent students having low grades from falling behind and dropping out.     

 

Maintained for years that since having well educated citizens is in the national interest, the Federal government should finance all public schools and that they should all be excellent nationwide, no exceptions, with an enlightened curriculum, not the very limited one we have had for decades and decades. Also that every high school should have a four-year course in psychology along with “group therapy” and “good parenting” workshops, given that so many of our youth have psychological problems and no understanding of psychology, of themselves or others. Crime, violence (including gun violence), abuse, and addiction, are all the result of people being mentally disturbed. Have also maintained that just as making addictive drugs illegal has not worked, gun control measures do not work, since black markets always exist. The problem is not the availability of addictive drugs and guns, the problem is psychological problems. It seems that as a nation we don’t want to acknowledge that, being in denial.