Varvares, Reaser To Lead Board in 2008-2009

NABE members have elected Chris Varvares as their president and Lynn Reaser as their vice president for the 2008-2009 year. In addition, members elected four new board members.  The two top officers and new board members will take office at the close of the 50th annual meeting Oct. 4-7 in Washington, D.C.

Varvares, president of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, will succeed Ellen Hughes-Cromwick as president of NABE, and Reaser will succeed Varvares as vice president.  Hughes-Cromwick, chief economist of Ford Motor Co., will remain on the board as a past president.  Her annual report to NABE members appears in this issue

Four new board members were elected to serve three-year terms:  Parul Jain, chief investment strategist, MacroFin Analytics ; Kim Flood, economist at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa;  Richard DeKaser, senior vice president and chief economist of the National City Corporation; and Paul Bennett, most recently senior vice president and chief economist of the New York Stock Exchange.

An active NABE member for more than 25 years, Varvares has served on NABE’s board and on the planning committee for the 2007 annual meeting.    Also he has co-chaired, with Hughes-Cromwick, the organizing committee for the March policy conference in 2004, 2005, and 2006. Varvares co-founded Macroeconomic Advisers with Joel Prakken and Laurence Meyer in 1982.

Reaser was elected to serve as member of NABE’s board in 2006 and she is currently chair of the Outlook Survey Committee and a contributor to the policy survey.  She is a co-chair of the 2008 Annual Meeting Committee and was a member of the 2007 Program Committee.  The native Californian is a past-president of NABE chapters in Los Angeles and Jacksonville, Fla.

Varvares Outlines Top Priorities

In a recent e-mail, Varvares said that he is “truly honored to serve as president and look forward to meeting more of you and hearing your good ideas (and a willingness to help implement them) as we work together to strengthen an already great organization.” He highlighted what he sees as the short and long-term goals for the NABE board and membership in the coming year.  These priorities include:

• Finalizing plans for the 50th Annual Meeting in October. Lynn Reaser and Kevin Kliesen and their committee and the NABE office have done an excellent job of designing this meeting, which will serve as a great launch into the organization's next half century.

• Finding a replacement for Susan Doolittle, who will be retiring after our annual meeting in 2009.  Our search committee has selected an executive search firm and will soon begin the process of defining the search parameters, conducting the search, and making our selection.  Replacing a person like Susan, who has performed exceptionally in this position for 15 years, will be no easy task. We are fortunate that Susan will help facilitate a smooth transition.

• Growing our membership.  Despite the excellent value-proposition offered by membership in NABE, our numbers are on a gradual trend decline.  We must continue to improve our product, make it relevant to the people who use economics in their work, and market it effectively. We will conduct a membership survey this fall to engage everyone in our process of making NABE even more valuable to members.

• Strengthening our commitment to the career development of our members.  We will re-institute the Education and Career Development Committee of the Board of Directors to refocus our efforts in this area and provide support to our members in an area where they realize real tangible value.

• Continuing our efforts to shore up the foundation of good policy making.  We have long been a proponent of adequate funding for economic statistics to insure that timely quality data is available to researchers, forecasters and policymakers.  Working with the NABE Foundation and our Statistics Committee we will re-double efforts to promote an appreciation among policymakers of the importance of quality economic statistics.

• Raising NABE’s profile to a level commensurate with the excellent value we offer our members and valuable service our members and NABE jointly offers the business community and policy makers.

Seven current board members will return for the 2008-2009 term.  Richard Brown, chief economist, FDIC, will serve the second year of the two-year term to which he was elected in 2007.  Four others will be in the second year of three-year terms:  Douglas G. Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist, Mortgage Bankers Association; Robert C. Fry, Jr., senior associate economist, DuPont; William A. Strauss, senior economist and economic adviser, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; and Paul A. Thomas, chief economist, Intel Corporation.

In addition, Sara Johnson, managing director of global macroeconomics at Global Insight, Inc., and Charles Steindel, senior vice president of research and statistics group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, will be in the third year of their three-year terms.  Leaving the board will be Catherine Mann, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor at Brandeis University; Ken Simonson, chief economist of the Associated General Contractors of America; Christopher Swann, Bureau of Economic Analysis; and Richard Wobbekind, associate dean at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Past President Carl Tannenbaum, nominating committee chairman, thanked members of the nominating committee: Richard Berner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley; Kathleen Camilli, president, Camilli Economics LLC; Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, chief economist at Ford Motor Company; Stuart Hoffman, chief economist of PNC Financial Services; Gene Huang, chief economist of FedEx Corporation; and Diane Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial.

When all the ballots were in, the count showed a total of 422 voting, with 67 percent casting electronic ballots and about 33 percent returning paper ballots. In the 2007 elections, a total of 377 members voted—54 percent cast ballots electronically and 46 percent on paper.

NABE’s board has 16 members: the president, vice president, two past presidents, and 12 directors.