For me he was the man to follow on equity markets as Salomon Bros' chief economist Henry Kaufman was the guru of the bond market whose musings on interest rates were also mandatory. I never counted the number of times I quoted Barton, but I always valued his insights, especially as I knew he'd been picking the brains of numerous hedge fund wheeler-dealers, as well as investors such as Loews Corp. chairman Larry Tisch, and of course the establishment figures in mutual funds and banks across the globe.
As I recall it, Barton was one of the first money men to look outside the US and particularly to the dynamic emerging markets for growth opportunities in stocks. In this role I believe Barton and his sidekick, Byron Wien, did Morgan Stanley a massively important service. Between them they attracted huge pools of capital (including the Kuwaiti sovereign wealth fund) to buttress Morgan Stanley's burgeoning asset management division-- as a counterpart to its investment banking franchise, which has always included household blue chip names like American Telephone, Exxon, General Motors and the like. You get the idea.
He was especially amusing and civilized in recounting his climbs up Mt. Kilmanjaro and other exotic adventures he took with some of the wealthiest investors in the world. No green eye shade for the Yale graduate who grew up in Greenwich, Conn. with all the right people.
What was not terribly amusing to him was my Forbes cover story in early 1993 which reported his surprising and quite sharply negative reaction to t he election of Bill Clinton as President. Reading his notes in the Morgan Stanley weekly research suggestions as I did every week, I recognized right away that his rather bald sell recommendation of American equities and even more strongly worded buy suggestions of equities in India(he loved Indian stocks early), China, Russia , Brazil, and I suppose several other Southeast Asian nations-- maybe Australia as well-- was an extraordinarily unique and controversial investment recommendation from one of Wall Street's most followed commentators. It was big news!
I didn't reckon on the late great Forbes editor, Jim Michaels, deciding to direct the art department to clothe the aristocratic and quite imposing Biggs in a bear costume that covered up his impeccable English tailored suit. I have to reveal today-- almost 20 years later-- that Biggs was not a happy camper at this rather crass and provocative treatment. He advised me that his matronly mother quite nearly fainted at the sight of her very proper and elegant son being rudely treated in a journalistic sense.
No doubt Barton was embarassed to see his dissing of the Clintons on our cover; " I want to get far away from Bill and Hillary. The President is a negative for the U.S. markets," is the tagline under his picture. The cover line was "Bearish on America."
What Barton never knew-- and I am only revealing it now, because it is amusing and quite underscores just how powerful and significant his role in finance was for so many decades. Some time after the issue hit the news stands I was in the company of the also late and very great investment banker, Dick Fisher, the chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley (a Princeton man by the way) who revealed to me that he was so worried by Barton's negative position on Clinton's tenure that he, Fisher, rushed to Washington and to the White House to apologize to Mack McLarty, President Clinton's chief of staff.
That high level intervention, I imagine, made sure that an irreverent cover story in a right wing Republican magazine would not be allowed to damage Morgan Stanley's relationship with the United States Government, and its remuneration from a bond.
Barton Biggs was a clever, humorous and highly intelligent man of letters. His words were like music compared to most banal, mundane Wall Street comment that is used to wrap fishes. I miss Barton's missives, his elegant, charming personality,and his valuable insights into the money game. He was always good fun-- which is not always the case about the top honchos of finance.
