Meet Goldman's Rock Star

On a chilly day in London in early February, the vast River Court Auditorium at Goldman Sachs International's Fleet Street headquarters is packed. In the audience are several hundred members of the City's business elite, including hedge-fund specialists, corporate officials, and currency dealers. The big draw is Jim O'Neill, a self-deprecating Manchester native who has made his name predicting the dollar's fall against the euro and other major currencies. His lectures attract crowds of pros eager to divine his secrets.

A partner and head of global economic research at Goldman, O'Neill has won respect for prescient calls such as the one that accurately forecast that the euro would rise from $1.25 in February, 2004, to $1.30 a year later. He predicted the yen's rise in the mid-1990s and also makes calls on other currencies such as the Swiss franc and the Canadian dollar. At Goldman, a market leader in the $1 trillion-a-day currency market, O'Neill is a rock star. "He has certainly been the top foreign-exchange economist anywhere in the world in the past decade," notes Gavyn Davies, a former BBC chairman and onetime co-head of Goldman's global economics group.