Biography
Rinfret was born in Montreal, Canada. His father and the entire family emigrated to the United States from Canada on November 12, 1929.
"We emigrated here because my father had gone bankrupt in his fur business. In Canada that was the ultimate disgrace and he was forced out, socially. He did not know a depression was coming in the U.S. and no one else did either. And so he thought he would have a new start. Little did he know what was ahead. He and all of us had gone from the frying pan into the fire!"
A self-made man, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Maine, and was then drafted into the Army in 1944, where he served General George S. Patton in France and received the Bronze Star. Upon his return he received a MBA from New York University, and spent two years in France as a Fulbright Scholar.
Working in the finance industry, he rose to become chairman of Lionel D. Edie in 1965 before forming his own firm. Rinfret served as an economic adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. In 1972, he was a Nixon campaign spokesman, and Nixon offered him a position on the Council of Economic Advisers and later considered him for a cabinet post.
He considered himself a professional financial analyst, first and foremost.
"I am the most proud of ... my 45 years of being a professional analyst of the U.S. and the world. I was always an iconoclast, an icon breaker. I never was afraid to think for myself. More often than not I went against the trend and the accepted wisdom. It got me into trouble quite frequently but my entire career was built on it..."
Read more about this topic: Pierre Andrew Rinfret
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