Economic consultant and investment advisor A. Gary Shilling was born in Fremont, Ohio on May 25, 1937. He graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College in 1960 with an A.B. in physics, and went on to receive an M.A. (1962) and a Ph.D. (1965) in economics from Stanford University. For the first 15 years of his career, Shilling worked as an economist for companies such as Standard Oil, Merrill Lynch, and WW & Co. In 1979, he began his own business, A. Gary Shilling & Co., Inc., in Springfield, N.J., and became president of Lakeview Economic Services. Since 1993, he has also been the owner of Lakeview Services, Inc. Shilling was named Top Commodity Trading Advisor by Futures Magazine in 1993… and Wall Street Top Economist (1975 and 1976) by Institutional Investor Magazine. He is a columnist for Forbes, S&P Credit Week, and Nihon Keizai Shimbun Journal, and the creator of The Deflation Game, an economics board game. Shilling has written several books about economics and investment strategies, including Is Inflation Ending? Are You Ready?; The World Has Definitely Changed: New Economic Forces and their Implications for the Next Decade; and After the Crash: Recession or Depression? A. Gary Shilling and his wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1962, have four children, Geoffrey, Andrew, Stephen and Jennifer.