Canada’s first celebrity economist has a gift for demystifying the secrets of the dismal science

ROB MAGAZINE Canada’s first celebrity economist has a gift for demystifying the secrets of the dismal science DAWN CALLEJA PUBLISHED 27 MINUTES AGO COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. Open this photo in gallery: Sherry Cooper. SAM SINGH/THE GLOBE AND MAIL Sherry Cooper became the first woman to be named chief economist of a big bank in Canada, at BMO in the 1980s. Now she’s chief economist for Dominion Lending Centres, Canada’s largest mortgage originator. Here she is in her own words: My mom was a typical 1950s housewife, but my grandmother—she and my grandfather owned a grocery store. They were always working. And I always thought my grandmother had a more interesting life than my mother. I didn’t know what economics was when I went to university in Baltimore. I fell in love with it. No two days are the same. And everyone cares about it, even if they don’t know it. The Federal Reserve in the late 1970s was fabulous—right at the leading edge of what was going on. Inflation was rip-roaring. We’d had two oil crises that were far, far worse than what we’re seeing today—gasoline wasn’t even available. We had the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, the year I worked for Paul Volcker, the Fed chair. He remained a mentor for years after. I knew nothing about the Canadian economy when I moved to Toronto. Rates were sky-high, and I’d been at the Fed, and what the Fed did was very important for Canada. My office at Burns Fry was a glass box on the trading floor. I loved the excitement of day-to-day movements, economic numbers coming out, 15 interviews a day with reporters. I love to explain things to people in ways they can understand. I think that’s my secret, that I could demystify secrets. Bay Street then was everything you could imagine and worse. Awareness of what was appropriate behaviour was non-existent. When BMO bought Burns Fry in 1994, it was a culture shock for a lot of people. The bank was much more staid and bureaucratic. When I left to work at Dominion, it was like being back at Burns Fry—a bunch of young people eating what they killed, no more bureaucracy. My biggest mistake was on dollarization. In the early 1990s, there was talk that we should tie the currency to the U.S. dollar. I was in favour of it, but it wouldn’t have made sense—we have our own independent monetary policy. Had I fallen flat on my face, I would’ve gotten a tremendous…