Written by John Lounsbury
It is with a heavy heart that I write this tribute to the “OldProf”, Jeff Miller, who passed from this life on May 7, 2021.
I have know Jeff for a little more than 12 years. We started to trade communications about each other’s blog articles at Seeking Alpha a few months after I started writing on that site in 2008. Jeff was already a seasoned veteran there, having been a contributor since 2006. I quickly discovered that he was more than just a “stock jockey”, but a keen student of many factors affecting the economy in general and investments in particular.
I have a distinct memory of Jeff challenging me to be more disciplined in my attempts to understand the employment numbers being reported in 2009 during The Great Financial Crisis. I learned a lot about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ processes at that time because Jeff knew them in exacting detail and had personal contacts on the BLS staff.
That is just one example of how Jeff reached out to other professionals as a professor would reach out to faculty and students when they could benefit from specific insights. Jeff was not the “OldProf” just because he taught for several years at the University of Wisconsin – He never stopped teaching thoughout his life.
When Steven Hansen and I started Global Economic Intersection in 2010, Jeff asked if there was anything he could do to help. We immediately said we would much appreciate it if he could contribute articles to the blog on a regular basis. He agreed to do that and over the years we posted 624 articles written by Jeff, putting him in the top 4 contributors for number of articles. He was a most dependable regular and frequently made our top 10 articles of the week listing.
I only met Jeff in person twice. The first time was about 9 or 10 years ago when he was in Raleigh to serve as an expert witness in a court case. We arranged that my wife and I would pick him up at his hotel and we would go out to dinner. Since another well-known blogger, Doug Short, also was in Raleigh and Jeff had never met him, we agreed I would invite Doug to join us. We went to Vivace to eat and the place was packed. Accoustics in the Raleigh Vivace are not the greatest and much of what anyone said at the table was not audible. Yet we “3 bloggers” held animated exchanges throughout dinner and dessert. On the way home my wife asked how we could talk like that when she couldn’t hear a thing we were saying. I said we were good lip readers and understood most of what either of the others was saying if we only got part of the words. Did I get a classic eye-roll for that! But it was true.
There are many ways I will miss Jeff Miller. I will miss waiting in the early hours every Sunday morning for Jeff to finish his weekly article. I will miss being privileged to be one of the first readers of “Weighing the Week Ahead” as I set up the version to be posted on our website. I will miss not having my biases toward the market jostled frequently by Jeff’s cool, logical analysis. I will miss the “OldProf”.
Others will miss him too. Here are some of the other tributes written on this occassion:
- A Tribute To Jeff Miller: A Legendary Teacher And Investor, Brad Thomas (Seeking Alpha)
- In Memory Of SA Contributor Jeff Miller: More Thoughts And Tributes, Eric Basmajian, New Deal Democrat, Robert Dieli, Jim Sloan, Georg Vrba, George Moriarty, Mark Hines, and Shareholders Unite (Seeking Alpha)
- Remembering Jeff Miller, Jeff’s son Derek (Seeking Alpha)
Jeff’s obituary notice from Surprise Funeral Care:
Finally, a note on Jeff’s blog “A Dash of Insight”, from Derek ends with the following statement:
Because there is so much to be gained from his work on this site, I intend to keep it up and running for as long as possible.
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