Financiers, bankers and public officials get guidance from economist Lynn Reaser, who has intimate knowledge of the booms and busts of business

Lynn Reaser

Job: Chief economist, Point Loma Nazarene University

Residence: Point Loma

Hometown: Los Angeles

Family: One brother

Education: Bachelor’s degree and doctorate in economics from University of California Los Angeles

Pick for next Federal Reserve Chair: Janet Yellen

Hobbies: Cyclist, tennis player and swimmer. The hobbies — like a 100-mile bike ride to Ocotillo one recent winter — get her mind off economics. Was she thinking about the unemployment rate while pedaling on the road? No, she said, “I’m thinking about how hard that seat is.”

On being a female economist:

Lynn Reaser was an undergraduate at UC Los Angeles when Armen Alchian set her mind ablaze. The famed economist gestured out a window to the street below and said, if you want to change Westwood Boulevard, you need to understand the economics of Westwood Boulevard.

It was a simple and immediate way of saying that economics has the power to let people define, reshape and improve their worlds, a message that resonated with Reaser.

“I took my first economics class, and I think I decided pretty quickly that I’d start immediately,” Reaser said.

She evolved into one of California’s most influential economists, a person who bankers and financiers and journalists turn to when they’re trying to grasp what’s happening outside the window, on the streets that surround them.

In careful, halting language, Reaser dispenses analysis from her office at Point Loma Nazarene University, a small San Diego school that has an outsize impact on the region’s economy, partly because of Reaser’s insights.

Reaser leads an economic institute she helped launch at Point Loma Nazarene in 2010. It’s where she guides major players in San Diego’s key sectors, such as the Military Advisory Council, the San Diego Zoo Global, Sempra Generation, Equinox Center and the San Diego Food Bank. The requests also come from Sacramento, where Reaser heads a board that advises state Controller John Chiang on global economics.

“If the stock market is going to drop 500 points based on what’s happening in Greece or if we get a shock like we did a couple months ago based on what’s happening in Cyprus,” Chiang said, “it’s nice to have somebody who has a sense of perspective and can provide context as to what it means.”

The move into academia is new for Reaser, who spent most of her multidecade career as chief economist at two major banks. But she still emphasizes the private sector in everything she does, including the one graduate-level class she teaches. Her textbooks? The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, two publications that provide windows into an ever-changing world.

“My job is basically having an enormous puzzle, and I’ve got all the pieces put together, at night when I leave,” Reaser said. “And then in the morning I come back to work and they’re all over the floor, so I spend the rest of the day trying to put them back together.”

Reaser finished her doctorate in economics at UCLA in 1974 in a speedy five years, then began her career as an economic analyst at First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles. She ultimately became its chief economist and followed a path into the private sector instead of teaching or conducting research at a university.


