How old is sherry cooper

Being a single mom for three years only confirmed my need for financial independence. Over the same period, my dad took ill and was unable to work, forcing my mom to get her first paying job at the age of Dad was a self-employed lawyer, with no formal pension and little life insurance.

When he died a few years later, my mom would have been in financial straits had she not precipitously in my view married a year later.

It has been extremely gratifying to me to be able to help my Mom financially, making it possible for her to live the past 10 years in a beautiful condo in Florida. Needless to say, I was passionate about giving my son the best education possible and hope to do the same for my grandchildren as well.

Over the years, my work has enabled me to help people assure their own financial security. My sense of purpose and legacy comes from bridging disciplines to interpret global issues through an economic lens — engaging and inspiring decision-makers to understand their worlds and see the opportunities ahead. I am a major donor to the causes I cherish: education, health care, helping women and the arts. But most of all, I am proud that my financial discipline and hard work has allowed me to assure the future for my family and generations to come.

That she's accomplished this in the competitive and still-male-dominated world of brokerage-house research and economics is all the more remarkable. Particularly among institutional clients and economists, who prefer to remain anonymous when subjects like Cooper come up, her success and survivability make her a kind of icon, the girl who didn't so much break into the boys' club as transcend it.

And it's easy to see why they feel that way. The media profile, the high-powered title and the big home in Toronto's tony Hoggs Hollow all contribute to the image of someone who's perfect in every way. Cooper has a loving and supportive husband, company director and consultant Peter Cooper, who first romanced her in after reading a brief profile of her in this magazine. She has a son, Stefan Atkinson, who excelled at Harvard and now aims to become an anchorman in New York.

Cooper also remains close to her mother and extended family in the U. Nobody else has the kind of impact on financial audiences that she has. Central to the pristine image is the Cooper work ethic. At 52, she routinely puts in hour days and spends more than four months of the year on the road, talking to corporate, institutional and retail brokerage clients, internal staff gatherings and just about any outside group that asks her.

Everyone from power brokers in Beijing to widows in Sarasota will bask in the warm glow of her slides. Her schedule would intimidate garden-variety workaholics: up at Mondays and Fridays; up at 5 Tuesday through Thursday "my sleep-in days". If there's no outside engagement, she's in the office no later than 7 to check on overnight markets and ponder how she'll guide her staff of 15 in the coming days and weeks.

When in Toronto, Cooper maintains her rapier-thin, pound body with aerobic and weight workouts six days a week at home or the Adelaide Club. At home, she favours small dinner parties. Usually, though, she devours economics papers-checking out the competition-as well as historical fiction and mysteries, before retiring at Cooper readily admits to being a type-A personality.

I do, and I'm human, but I get upset when something goes out saying something went up when I meant down. To better understand Sherry Cooper, though, we need to take a leaf out of her book and do the equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation. Naturally this starts with the macro highlights. It is with considerable understatement that BMO private client group CEO Gilles Ouellette observes, "She conveys an image of the bank that I think is really appealing to the investing public.

Even before she had completed her doctorate, she'd scored a coup by being hired on as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. One of her mentors there, Edward Ettin, says she was an easy hire.

She quickly caught on at Burns Fry Ltd. As an economist, Cooper is a product of her times, reflecting the influence of the supply-side policies of the Reagan administration, not to mention the monetarist approach that marked her days at the Fed.

She favours globalization and likes countries like Canada to maintain strong currencies, if only because it keeps them honest and forces them to take the hard steps that will truly boost productivity. She opposes outright welfare statism, arguing that the likes of France and Germany are on the road to semi-permanent stagnation.

Her quintessentially American economic sensibility-a long-time fan of tax cuts, she also believes that "dollarization," a move to U. But she has also Canadianized her stance after 20 years in Toronto. I see an important role for government, to be sure; I think government should be taking care of people who cannot take care of themselves, and government is best at providing public-sector works like highways and defence and homeland security. Cooper doesn't actually sell products, but a combination of economic ideas and a public image for the bank.

She doesn't solicit customers so much as influence people to become customers. She helps build the brand and assumes they will come. Cooper knows her presentations to BMO Financial Group brokers make them more effective in serving their clients because they tell her so. She also knows that in the days and weeks after she talks to seniors' groups in Florida, for example, many of them will become clients of Harris Bank.

And Coxe says that the day after he and Cooper do their annual joint presentation for the Toronto bond traders, the orders flood in. Says Coxe, "What you're trying to do is convince the institutions out there to give you a share of their business. That means they've got to take you seriously and believe you've got overall depth in your research department.

Institutions, though, are a very tough sell. In my organization none of it has much impact," says one pension fund manager. At their best, economists are more useful in identifying, and bringing perspective to, longer-term trends than they are in predicting the next quarter's growth rate.

In other words, they provide only a few of the many tea leaves the institutions have to read. Almost always, institutional spokespeople add, investment decisions are made on the basis of an in-house consensus, not an external recommendation from an economist. Of course, the institutions will also tell you that success as a bank economist doesn't necessarily have much to do with economics per se. As this same pension fund manager notes, "Your influence is more your bedside manner and your ability to take relatively complex issues and state them in ways that people think they understand.

There's a large marketing aspect to this whole thing. The accuracy of the information, surprisingly, really doesn't have a lot to do with it. That and the fact that bank economists go in and out of fashion faster than reality TV shows. Canadians do not want to lose an independent Bank of Canada, and the U. By July , her mindset had changed on the matter and she stated in a note to institutional investors that, "The world may realize that it is no longer reasonable for the US dollar to be the anchor currency.

In a January interview on CBC Radio's The Current she made the statement that the financial crisis of would not have occurred "if the world had been full of female traders," and attributes the mismanagement to testosterone. In the same interview she also suggested that the members of the financial sector who were responsible were equally harmed by the crisis as others, such as people who lost their homes.

Miller, University of Pittsburgh Press, If you work in one of those areas, the demands on your time are enormous. You have no life and you stay until two in the morning. Why do you think that is? Well, I think the state of governance in Canada is better than in the U. I did take the Rotman course for directors, though, and I loved being back at school. I was actually class valedictorian.

I talked about the fact there are too many companies where the C-suite protects the board from speaking to the rank and file or participating fully in issues that are very much real but are not brought to their attention.

I think the role of board members is to ask the tough questions and keep asking until they get answers they understand. But that balance is complicated. When the Canadian dollar hit 60 cents, 62 cents—I think at one point it might have even gone below 60 cents—I talked about dollarization, and people interpreted that to mean that I was predicting dollarization or that I was prescribing it when I knew the U.

I was really talking about the costs of an ever-declining currency. I think my Wikipedia page still mentions it, though it was almost 30 years ago.