Larry and his long-time colleagues, Derek Tang, Kevin Burgett and Jacqueline Dolson, co-founded MPA/LHM. They were Larry’s team at Monetary Policy Insights which Larry earlier had founded inside Macroeconomic Advisers.
The adventure began when Larry was a professor of the Economics Department at Washington University in St. Louis for 27 years, teaching macroeconomics and monetary theory to undergraduates and graduate students. He won several teaching awards along the way. During this time, his understanding of monetary policy was further deepened by a year as a visiting scholar at the St. Louis Fed and then at the NY Fed.
In 1982, while still at the University, he founded Laurence H. Meyer & Associates, the beginning of his consulting career. That was quite an adventure, starting without any clients and initially working out of offices at Washington University. The firm quickly gained stature and clients, helped by articles about Larry and the firm in Businessweek. Larry twice won the award for the top forecaster on the Blue Chip forecasting panel. The firm gained additional recognition when it was commissioned by the CEA to assess the effect of President Reagan’s tax proposals on the economy.
LHM&A upended the forecasting market when it introduced the first commercially available macroeconometric model that could be run on the newly introduced PC. This allowed firms to run forecasting exercises for a fraction of the fees changed by other forecasting firms. LHM&A soon became the premier firm in macro forecasting and monetary policy analysis.
The firm was renamed Macroeconomic Advisers when Larry was nominated by President Clinton to be a member of mthe Federal Reserve Board. He served from June 1996 through January 2002. His speeches were closely followed by market participants and the media because he regularly talked about the implications of the outlook for monetary policy, because they often had a market impact. He became widely known as an influential member of the FOMC, for his straight talk about monetary policy and his ability to bring order from the chaos of economic data.
After he left the Board, he wrote the widely acclaimed book, A Term at the Fed: An Insider’s View, discussing his journey to the Board, how monetary policy is made, and the adventures in monetary policy while he was there.
After leaving the Board, he rejoined Macroeconomic Advisers and began the highly successful Monetary Policy Insights service. He took his team with him when founded MPA/LHM in 2016 to continue their work at Monetary Policy Analytics.