Terrin Griffiths Distills Data for California, Nevada Credit Unions
When the housing crisis and credit crunch hit hard in 2007, NABE member Terrin Mendivil Griffiths knew her task of explaining the fast-evolving situation would be a daunting one. For the last four years, she has served as economist and industry analyst for the California/Nevada Credit Union Leagues.
The task remains challenging even as the crises have eased, Griffiths said in a mid-May phone interview. In many ways, her earlier work as a senior field economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ price program prepared her for work with the credit unions, she said, citing the critical skill of gathering and distilling data for presentation to a more general audience.
“Staying on top of all economic and industry developments is the most challenging part of my job,” Griffiths said. Among her regular duties are writing a quarterly report on the California and Nevada economies and a monthly article for the league’s magazine. “Many of the chief executive officers of our credit union members may not have time to keep abreast of the latest developments, so we distill the information for our members,” she said.
Plus, she is often called upon to respond to media inquiries, especially in recent times when reporters want to know how the credit crunch affects credit unions and related issues. “Especially in the current environment, it is a challenge to speak on behalf of the league. We represent a big range of credit unions—from just over $100,000 in assets to $7.5 billion in assets.
With some parts of California and Nevada among the areas of the country with the largest number of foreclosures, the Credit Union League has been under pressure to respond quickly and thoroughly to members requesting information. Griffths also frequently makes presentations to conferences and meetings of league members and business groups in the area.
After a hectic period in March and April, as new federal policies and initiatives were developed to address the housing and credit problems, Griffiths said that as of mid-May, “things are getting back to normal.” Credit unions are trying to sort through how the proposed new rules and policies might affect them in the future.
A NABE member since early 2007, she promptly joined the Get Connected team, recognizing the importance of involving other new members soon after they join NABE. “I joined NABE so that I could interact with more individuals in the field of economics and better serve by member credit unions, “ she said, adding that joining Get Connected was a “great way to get involved.”
Collecting Prices, Learning Industry Trends
Learning to gather and distill economic information was very much part of Griffiths’s earlier job at the BLS regional field office in the Los Angeles area. For about six years, she was on the team of analysts who collect price quotes for the producer price index and import/export price data series. “It was very interesting work, and I learned a little bit about every industry and how the economy was impacting each one,” she said.
Before she visited industrial company offices to collect price data, Griffiths would study the latest BLS reports on the sector and try to understand “the different dynamics” in play at the time, which she felt helped her gather as much useful information as she could from corporate officers. “Sometimes I met with chief executive officers or chief financial officers, and it helped to know what the industry was dealing with at the time,” she said.
Griffths followed the high technology sector in Silicon Valley through its boom and bust cycle of the late 1990s and the crash in 2000. She also tracked price movements in the furniture industry and many others. “Basically all industries were cycled through during my tenure there, but the more memorable ones, due to the dynamics in play, were the high tech, furniture, apparel, ceramics, and the increasingly important service/retail sector,” she said.
Her close-up look at these industries “validated some of the theories” that she was learning in her economics graduate studies at California State University-Long Beach, even as it gave her new ideas about how markets work at different points in the business cycle. For three years, she combined her graduate studies with her work at BLS.
Sometimes her work with the BLS prompted her to set the record straight about how price measures are based on actual price quotes gathered in the field. “Some of my professors seemed to think that the PPI and CPI were made up” rather than based on industry data, she said, adding that she described in class how the indexes reflect prices received by producers in different industries.
When she decided to move on from the BLS job, Griffiths realized that “my specialization in data collection and aggregation and being able to explain the data in laymen’s terms would fit with what the Credit Union League was seeking in an analyst. I was not interested in forecasting, but rather in working in a job where I could distill data and help explain it,” she said.
Accidentally Discovering Economics
Griffths said her discovery of economics as a career was accidental. “I was pursuing my undergraduate degree in mathematics and needed to take some statistics courses in a specific field of study. I thought economics would prove to be the most interesting and useful, but I did not want to go into an advanced course without having the same foundation my classmates had. So I took introductory micro and macroeconomics and was hooked,” she said.
Near the end of her undergraduate program, she had come to enjoy mathematics, especially the logic skills required, and that caused her to look at jobs that required an economics degree. And at that time, she found there were many employers looking for employees with degrees in economics.
What advice would she offer to students and newly minted economists about getting a start in the profession, given her experience? “Given my dual degree and other commitments I had as I pursued my studies, I never had the opportunity to explore partnering with professors on projects. In hindsight, this would have been highly beneficial, as it would have helped me to build that skill set more quickly. So, I guess it would be to take advantage of every opportunity to learn from willing mentors.”
