Martin Barnes, the International Money Expert

Martin Barnes has a tough job. He took over the editorship of the Bank Credit Analyst, the leading newsletter of international monetary commentary, from Tony Boeckh, who put the publication on the map. Following Boeckh, who in turn had succeeded the newsletter's founder, Hamilton Bolton, was no simple task. Barnes had to be balanced but appeal to the generally conservative, absolute return clientele that he served. And he did it in a masterly way so that now the BCA, as the monthly publication is informally called, carries his stamp.

Barnes is the serious Scot of literature. But talking about finance and global figures brings forth a twinkle. He finds global finance a world of amazement and wonder. And his charge is to survey it all, to sort and make something of the pieces he likes. He brings a classicist's range of intellect to the task. And numbers are the language of his choice. Give him a set of data, and he is likely to produce a chart, perhaps going back fifty years, illustrating a parallel to the conditions he sees today.

Barnes is a real long-termer in a market where the long term typically means a week or a little longer over holidays. Thus he has trouble with the market demands of hour-by-hour trading insights. His tools are not that fine but rather suited to cycles: one of his favorites, for example, is long-wave dynamics, which have a periodicity of about 60 years. But Barnes balances the demand for nowism with perspective. And he, Boeckh and their colleagues have broadened the geographic coverage of the BCA and its stablemate publications in the BCA group to cover with equal intensity every developed market, most major developing ones and all instruments. If you had to choose between a daily chart book or the BCA, you would be better off taking Barnes' work. It not only tells you where you are on the investment map but, more importantly, which map you have.

Barnes' research and writing cover a broad spectrum of subjects of relevance to investors. In the past few years, he has written extensively about new technologies and long-wave cycles, the financial market implications of low inflation and trends in corporate profitability.