About Jeff Speakes

Jeff Speakes, Ph.D., CFA, is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Management at California Lutheran University (CLU) where he teaches investments and financial economics. He is also the founder of Speakes Asset Management. He has over 30 years of experience as a portfolio manager, risk manager, and financial services executive. He was formerly Senior Managing Director and Chief Economist at Countrywide Financial Corporation where he developed and managed the industry leading-edge hedge program for mortgage servicing rights. He was also Senior Vice President, Investments for Union Federal Savings Bank, and Head of U.S. Forecasting at the Claremont Economics Institute.

Jeff received a Ph.D. in economics and an MA in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley and is a CFA charter holder. His first academic position was as an assistant professor of economics at the Claremont Graduate University (CGU). He has also taught at the University of Southern California.

Jeff is a long-time student of the martial arts, in particular Okinawan Goju-Ryu.  He is presently ranked “Shichidan” (7th-degree black belt) by his instructor of more than thirty years, Hanshi Anthony Marquez.  Jeff and his wife, Gwen, have three children and three grandchildren. They live in Camarillo, California.

Send Jeff an email or follow his social channels.

Essays

 
 
Essays
The Richest Man in Babylon

One of the best books on financial planning is The Richest Man in Babylon, written by George Clasen and first published in 1926. The book consists of a few stories set in ancient Babylon.

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The Augmented Household Balance Sheet

Every household has a balance sheet, whether they know it or not. The balance sheet shows the value of assets, the book value of debts, and the difference which is net worth.

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Lessons From Forrest Gump

You may recall the movie Forrest Gump in which the title character, played by Tom Hanks, was a simple person who happened to have a ringside seat on many of the major events in American history in the 1950s through the 1970s.

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75 is Old Enough

Ezekial Emanuel is an oncologist and professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has recently been appointed to Joe Biden’s COVID Task Force.

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Money Management Miscues

James Parry knew at a young age that he wanted to grow up to be a money manager.  It was during his undergraduate years at the University of Washington in Seattle, that the economics major first subscribed to the Financial Analysts Journal (FAJ), the flagship publication of the professional society for Chartered Financial Analysts (CFAs). 

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Progress

My recent essays have focused on the 10% upper tail of the wealth or income distribution.    People generally acknowledge that the top ten percent are doing great.  Perhaps this is true by definition.  If they were doing poorly, they would not be in the top 10%!  What about the other 90%?  Let’s start with the overall picture.  Academic psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest book1 documents the enormous material progress that has been achieved and enjoyed not just by the elite, but rather by the majority of mankind, over the past 200 years.  While these trends have been noted by many authors, it is useful to run through them again quickly.  Longevity has increased dramatically.  Infant mortality has plummeted.

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John Bogle, RIP

John Bogle died earlier this year at the age of 89. According to legendary investor Warren Buffett, Bogle created more wealth for investors than anyone else in history.

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80% at 80!

A typical piece of financial advice is to reduce your equity allocation as you age. When you are young, there is plenty of time to recover from a market debacle. Not so much if the debacle occurs after you are already retired.

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Publications

 
 

  • What Can Go Wrong: Essays on the Financial Crisis

    This book is a collection of essays about the financial crisis written by Jeffrey K. Speakes, Phd, former Chief Economist for Countrywide Financial Corporation. According to the author, this slim volume contains the root cause of the crisis. However, just like with a Waldo puzzle, you have to search to find it. The author is currently Director of Financial Markets for the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at California Lutheran University

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  • The Sustainable Wealth Plan

    This series of essays provides a simple approach to managing the key elements of your financial life — building and protecting your human capital, managing your financial capital, and identifying a stable and sustainable consumption path.

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  • Should You Hire a Financial Advisor?

    In general, we expect that a beginner or novice in a field is likely to be out-performed by a seasoned veteran. We would be surprised if a beginner could build a better house than a skilled carpenter, or if an amateur boxer could knock out a pro.

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  • Essays on Building Family Wealth

    This is a collection of essays on the merits of building family wealth. By “family wealth” I mean wealth that persists over the generations. I make two perhaps controversial claims: first, building family wealth is a good thing. Second, nearly everyone can do it.

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 Wisdom from

The Great Economists

 
 

  • “Consider what is unseen, as well as what is seen when evaluating economic policy.”

    — Bastiat

  • “In describing what I consider to be the most likely scenario for inflation, I do not wish to convey an unwarranted degree of certainty.”

    — Ben Bernanke

  • “In the investment business, you get what you don’t pay for.”

    — John Bogle

  • “Wages are only earned by workers who have jobs”

    — Don Boudreaux

  • “I’d like to thank the business schools of America for teaching generations of students not to compete with me.”

    — Warren Buffett

  • “As an investor you want to find companies that a fool could run, because eventually one will.”

    — Warren Buffett

  • “A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.”

    — George W. Bush

  • “Last fall we were on the edge of an abyss. Since then we have taken an important step forward.”

    — George W. Bush

  • “Capitalism tries for a delicate balance. It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just about enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other peoples’ stuff.”

    — George Carlin

  • "The purpose of an economist is to tell you what will happen in the future, and when it does not, explain why not."

    — Winston Churchill

  • “If you torture the data long enough it will confess.”

    — Ronald Coase

  • “The long run begins now.”

    — Milton Friedman

  • “A bank will give you a loan so long as you can prove you don't need it.”

    — Robert Frost

  • “My formula for success is to rise early, work late, and strike oil.”

    — J. Paul Getty

  • “Any statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it.”

    — Charles Goodhart

  • “I know you think you understood what you heard me say, but I wonder if you realize that is not what I meant.”

    — Alan Greenspan

  • “We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”

    — Walt Kelly

  • “Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else.”

    —Robert Lucas

  • “Demand for commodities is not demand for labor.”

    — John Stuart Mill

  • “Stability is de-stabilizing.”

    — Hyman Minsky

  • “The greatest wealth is to be content with little.”

    — Plato

  • “We are on an irreversible course toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change.”

    — Dan Quayle

  • “If you want to go to a Halloween party dressed up as an economist, it's easy, just put egg on your face”

    — Ronald Reagan

  • “There is no reason to think an economist's views on the market are worse than anyone else's.”

    — Will Rogers

  • “The fact that a second then a third and finally a fourth QE was necessary meant that there never was any "Q" to begin with.”

    — Jeffrey Snider

  • “The first lesson of economics is that we live in a universe of scarcity and we face tradeoffs. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.”

    — Thomas Sowell

  • “If a trend cannot continue, it won't.”

    — Herb Stein

  • “No one in the history of the world ever washed a rented car.”

    — Larry Summers

  • “History doesn't evolve, it jumps.”

    — Nassim Taleb

  • “Please give me a one-armed economist.”

    — Harry Truman

  • “Thrift is a wonderful virtue; particularly in an ancestor.”

    — Mark Twain

  • “The stone age ended not because we ran out of stone. The oil age will end before we run out of oil.”

    — Sheik Yamani

  • “Consider what is unseen, as well as what is seen, when evaluating economic policy.”

    —Bastiat