Flamboyant Pierre

Take two parts of insight and three parts of gall. Combine with chunks of meaty research, season with flammable forecasts and serve sizzling on a sharpened verbal skewer. The recipe describes the concoctions of Economist Pierre Rinfret, 46, the engaging, bumptious and increasingly conspicuous purveyor of advice to corporations, investment bankers, Presidents and other politicians.

Rinfret is part Puck, part Polonius. The blend is instantly apparent when, his chubby face rumpling into a smile, he admits that he is more than a bit controversial: "When Pierre stands up to speak, they say, There he goes again, that publicity seeker, that headline hunter.' Perhaps Pierre is flamboyant, perhaps he does make headlines. They forget that Pierre does his homework too, and a lot of the time he's more right than the little gray men."

No Recession? Economist Rinfret wants to be taken seriously, and he often is. Part of his record, at least, merits respect. He correctly forecast a business downturn in 1961, a superboom following the 1964 tax cuts, and a great leap in defense spending after the 1966 escalation of the Viet Nam War. He has been right for the past two years in anticipating severe inflation, tight money and record-high interest rates. Many cash-shy corporations, he warned, could not stop borrowing, no matter how costly it became. On the other hand, he failed to foresee that industrial production would decline late last year and much of this year so far. Last December, he startled a Manhattan conference of businessmen with the attention-grabbing prophecy: "There ain't gonna be no recession."

Ruefully, Rinfret concedes: "That got me a lot of bad publicity." Even so, he still defends that forecast as technically accurate, because classic recessions have involved, for example, sharper rises in unemployment and declines in production than the U.S. has experienced. But of late he has vacillated. "The only way to solve inflation is by a recession," he wrote two months ago, "and that is the way we seem to be heading." After President Nixon's latest speech on the economy, Rinfret again changed his mind. "It was a turning point in economic policy," he says. "The odds modestly favor an upturn in the second half of the year. Both fiscal and monetary policy have shifted from restraint to expansion." As Rinfret sees it, the Administration was forced to stop using these two main weapons against inflation in order to avoid a financial panic. Now he adds: "The only way left to fight inflation is with controls. Don't be surprised if the next move is direct intervention in the economy."

Into the Public Eye. Born in Montreal, Rinfret attended Maine and New York universities, won a Ph.D. in political economics from France's University of Dijon. In 1951, he joined the Manhattan consulting firm of Lionel D. Edie as a $5,750-a-year junior economist, rose to chairman in 1964. He began to move into the public eye after President Johnson, searching for ways to defend his own policies in 1964, quoted one of Rinfret's bullish surveys of industry plans for expansion as evidence that the economy was then turning up. Johnson stumbled over the pronunciation of Rinfret's name (it is Ren-frey), but the economist shrewdly used the incident to promote himself as an expert quoted by the President.

In 1966, Rinfret quit Edie to form the Manhattan-based firm of Rinfret-Boston Associates (so named because 60% of its stock is owned by The Boston Co., a holding company). Pretax profits climbed to $192,000 last year, and this year Rinfret expects to earn at least $452,000 from revenues of $1,480,000. For $10,000 a year, clients get hundreds of newsletter-like reports, pastel-colored for higher visibility on crowded executive desks. Some clients part with $50,000 annually for such extra attention as two personal meetings with Rinfret and unlimited access to the research of his 29-member staff. Rinfret even issues his wisdom in tape cassettes; they erase the message as they are played so that customers cannot pass them along to non-paying friends.

Playing It Unsafe. Rinfret was a campaign adviser to Richard Nixon, and he remains on good terms with the President even though he has been outspokenly critical of Nixon's economic performance. Once he went so far as to write: "We accuse the Administration of incompetence." Nevertheless, Rinfret was one of the five outside economists whom Nixon called to a White House meeting in May for advice.

Though most scholarly economists dismiss Rinfret as an airy maverick with a gift for pungent phrases, some rivals take a more tolerant view. Says a former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: "He has one supreme virtue. He makes you think, because he is provocative. The men who qualify every statement may rack up a better forecasting record, but that's because they play it safe." Not even his detractors accuse promotion-minded Pierre Rinfret of playing it safe.

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