The Unbeatable Ed Hyman

Detailed summary

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Edward S. Hyman Jr. is Wall Street’s greatest living economist. And a nice guy too. The former has been documented every October since…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Edward S. Hyman Jr. is Wall Street’s greatest living economist. And a nice guy too. The former has been documented every October since 1976 in Institutional Investor. The latter, most recently by everyone interviewed for this article.

After a total of 40 years as the No. 1 analyst in economics on the All-America Research Team, another four in second place, and a single appearance as a runner-up, you might wonder when enough will be enough for Ed Hyman, who is now 75. I was tasked with finding out how much longer he plans to stay in the game. That would be a great scoop. Might he be architecting a graceful exit sometime soon?

That settled, the assignment to profile Hyman took a different direction.

While discussing Hyman’s unrivaled success with another veteran of the All-America Research Team, that analyst brought up the flip-side of the Evercore ISI chairman’s record run at No. 1: In the last 41 years, not a single economist from Morgan Stanley or JPMorgan or Bank of America or UBS has managed to make, even for one brief shining moment, the First Team for economics. In fact, in the last dozen years, first and second place have been locked up by the same two people: Hyman and his former C.J. Lawrence/ISI compatriot, Cornerstone Macro’s Nancy Lazar. (More about Lazar later.)

A Goldman Sachs analyst held the No. 1 position before Hyman captured it in 1980; that analyst disappeared from the ranking soon after. In the most recent decade, Goldman’s Jan Hatzius and Deutsche Bank’s Torsten Slok are the only representatives of full-service investment banks who have come anywhere close to breaking into the winner’s circle. Hatzius was voted a runner-up in 2020, 2017, and 2013 and placed third in 2011 and 2010. Slok held steady on the Third Team from 2012 to 2017, but is now out of the picture; in August, he left Deutsche Bank after 15 years for Apollo Global Management.

Bottom line, the sanctum sanctorum of Wall Street economists has…

He…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Institutional Investor. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.