The Sweeney Agency

About Bill Conerly - Speaker on the Economy:

Dr. Bill Conerly connects the dots between the economy and business decisions. As a consultant, he not only forecasts the economy but also helps business leaders understand how their challenges will change with the evolving economy. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Duke University and was formerly Senior Vice President at First Interstate Bank.

Dr. Conerly is an on-line contributor to Forbes and the author of Businomics: From the Headlines to Your Bottomline—How to Profit in Any Economic Cycle. He is co-author of Thinking Economics, a multi-media high school economics curriculum used in 34 states.

Dr. Conerly has been interviewed on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, CNN and local television and radio stations across the country. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, and USA Today.

Dr. Conerly is chairman of the board of Cascade Policy Institute, a member of Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber’s Council of Economic Advisors, and a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis.

What Bill Conerly Talks About:

The Economic Outlook
This presentation focuses on the current issues of greatest concern to business managers and owners. Key issues include:

• The economic outlook for the nation and key industries
• Financial markets: the outlook for interest rates and the stock market
• The regional or industry outlook, based upon the interests of the particular audience.

The presentation is laced with commentary on current events and anecdotes about current business challenges, such as maintaining financial flexibility in a recession, getting ready for the recovery, facing foreign competition. Specific content varies with the economy and the audience.

How To Thrive in the New Economy: Business Challenges of Renewed Cyclicality
Your business was optimized for the economy of the past 25 years. That enabled you to grow and to survive the Great Recession. The next decade, however, will be different. What needs to change in your company to thrive in the new economy? Dr. Conerly argues that the next decade will be more volatile than the economy of the past quarter-century, requiring changes across the business, ranging from sales forecasting to inventory management to financial management. He offers specific suggestions for tuning up your enterprise for the new economy, presented with his hallmark sense of humor and common sense explanations.

The Next Decade: What Businesses should do TODAY to prepare for Tomorrow
Bill Conerly is an expert on what business leaders should to right now to create a more profitable business future. Bill looks at the big changes we can expect in the next decade – demographics, globalization, finance, and technology – avoiding speculation as much as possible. Instead, he relies on business history, current trends and comprehensive research to make his forecasts. At every step he connects future scenarios with action plans that leaders should put in place now. Specifics are adjusted for the particular audience, and often include how to prepare for the coming demographic time bomb, how to use advances in data capture and storage to set more profitable prices; how to use new social networking tools to improve employee productivity and increase customer loyalty.

The New World of Capital
All of us are affected, to one degree or another, by the new world of capital we’re entering, but bankers and borrowers in particular are facing new rules and changing relationships. Before the mortgage crisis, the financial world was altered by the larger role that hedge funds, private equity funds, and sovereign wealth funds were playing, which was further accentuated by globalization. Now, securitization has a black eye from the financial crisis, banks have suffered severe losses, and regulators are cracking down. Dr. Bill Conerly’s humorous and accessible presentation will help bankers and other finance professionals look beyond the current situation and get ready for “the new normal.” Bill’s programs are essential because they emphasize the issues that should be addressed NOW to prepare for the future.