An important economist: not a celebrity

One of the important financial economists writing today is Mohamed El-Erian, who grew up as the son of an Egyptian diplomat and was the deputy director of the IMF for three years in the 1990s.

He is quite well known to folks like me, who look to his analyses to guide our work reporting day to day events. But he is not well known at all to the "general public," where that term is taken to mean the sort of people who know that Paul Krugman or Robert Shiller are important economists.

I'm old enough to remember when Friedman and Galbraith were the economists whose name came to the tongue of many non-economists. They both passed away in the first decade of the new millennium, and the public attention has done what it does ... it has passed on.

I may say more about El-Erian's non-celebrity work soon. For now, I will only lay down that he has recently said that on June 24, "The most notable price action in US markets" was the fall by 9 basis points of US government yields.

This indicates to him that the bond market is finally responding to the fall in oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude fell below $70 intra-session.

I am somewhat confused by this. I think he is trying to say that the fall of bond yields reflects a lessening of inflationary expectations. But with due respect to a fine mind: is this lowered expectation due to the oil prices-- the movement of which seems tentative and blown about by shifts in the winds of war? It seems to me to be better explained by developments at the Fed.

At any rate, that is El-Erian above. If you weren't aware of him before, you are now. Welcome to the cognoscenti!

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