Allen Sinai

Allen Sinai Speaker Biography

World-Renowned Economist, Advisor, and Market Guru

Allen Sinai is chief global economist, strategist, and president of Decision Economics, Inc. (DE), a global economics and financial markets information support and advisory firm, responsible for the firm’s research, forecasts, and strategy advice.  Founded in 1996, DE is located in New York, Boston, and London, and serves well over 300 financial institutions, corporations, governments, and individuals worldwide.

Market Expert

For well over three decades, Dr. Sinai has served a wide variety of organizations and decision makers in the United States and abroad as an analyst, forecaster, educator, and economic policy, strategy, and financial markets adviser.  He has a long history of combining pure academic research, model building, and applied forecasting, investment, and business experience in providing information support and advice to all kinds of senior level decision makers.  He has been consulted by various Administrations from both political parties on key economic and policy issues, has often testified before Congress, and meets regularly with senior level policymakers from many countries.  He is known for his objective fact-based analyses and forecasts, which for nearly 35 years have proved to be quite accurate, especially on the economy and financial markets and on “big wave” economic, political, and societal fundamental trends that move markets and business.  Sinai has won a number of forecasting awards, including Top Forecaster–Wall Street Journal Survey in 2006, the USA Today Survey Top Forecaster in 2005 and 2003, Top Guru in the Business Week Survey of 1997, and first three times in MarketWatch’s High-Frequency Indicator Survey, eight times Runner-up.

Global Economist

Between 1983 and 1996, Sinai was chief global economist, a managing director, and the director of Lehman Brothers Global Economics at Lehman Brothers, Inc.. He joined Lehman in 1983 and established the Lehman Economics Department.  From 1988 to 1992, he served as executive vice president and chief economist of The Boston Company, an asset management and banking subsidiary of Shearson Lehman Brothers, where he also headed a small economic information company, The Boston Company Economic Advisors, Inc.. Before Lehman Brothers, he was at Data Resources, Inc. (DRI) from 1971-1983 as chief financial economist and as a senior vice president, working with founder and renowned Harvard Economist Otto Eckstein in macroeconomic and financial markets forecasting and as a co-developer of the DRI Model of the U.S. Economy.  At DRI, he also served as chairman of the Financial Information Group, which provided a large portion of DRI’s business, sold in 1979 to the McGraw-Hill Co.

Academics

Dr. Sinai has held a number of teaching and research positions at leading universities.  He has been a lecturer and adjunct professor of Economics and Finance in the Lemberg Program of International Economics and Finance at Brandeis University.  He taught in the Sloan School of Management at MIT.  He also taught at New York University, Boston University, and the University of Illinois (Chicago), where he was a tenured professor.  He has given hundreds of speeches and presentations to various groups and decision makers, ranging from individual investors to corporate executives, boards, and other decision makers.  He has lectured and spoken in Japan, Korea, other areas in the Asia-Pacific, in China, the U.K., Scandinavia, Europe, Mexico and Latin America, and throughout the United States.  He is a board director of Boston Private Financial Holdings, Inc., a nationally-based banking, investment management and financial planning company and winner of the NACB Best Director, Best Board award May 2007, and he is a member, Aspen Institute Italia.  In 2004 he served as president of the North American Economics and Finance Association (NAEFA), one of the academic associations of university professors, and he is a past president and a fellow of the Eastern Economics Association (EEA).

Macroeconomics

Sinai and his colleagues are the developers of the Sinai-Boston (SB) Large Quarterly Macroeconomic Model of the U.S., one of the largest, most accurate, and complete large-scale macroeconometric models of the U.S. economy and financial markets, and he is a pioneer in the National Information Systems approach to analyzing and forecasting economies and financial markets.  Large-scale country macroeconometric models of China, the U.K., Japan, Germany, France, Italy and India are some of the other country macroeconometric models developed at Decision Economics, Inc.

Media

Dr. Sinai has written numerous articles and papers in the scientific literature and popular press, authoring, or co-authoring, over 40 articles in scholarly journals and publications.  He has frequently been in the news media and over many years has appeared on numerous national television programs such as CNBC’s Street Sight, Power Lunch, Squawk Box, Bloomberg’s On The Economy, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America, Moneyline, Nightline, the Today Show, CBS Morning News, ABC Nightly News, Today’s Business, Ahead of the Curve, This Week With David Brinkley, Face the Nation, and Wall Street Week.  He has been a member of the Time Magazine Board of Economists.  In 1992, Dr. Sinai was selected as one of the ten “Smartest People” in Boston by Boston Magazine.  Time Magazine has said of him, “Anyone who thinks economics is a dismal science has never been treated to the vivid commentaries of Allen Sinai.”

Education

Allen Sinai holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the University of Michigan (1961) and a Doctorate in Economics from Northwestern University (1969).  He is married to Lee Sinai, an author of recreational books on biking, hiking, and kayaking.  The Sinai’s have two children–Todd, a professor at The Wharton School, with a Ph. D. in Economics from MIT and Lauren, who has an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and works for a private equity firm in Chicago–and five grandchildren.