Don Coxe has four decades of institutional investment experience in Canada and the US. As a strategist and investor, he has been engaged at the senior level in global capital markets through every recession and boom since the onset of stagflation in 1972. He has worked on the buy side and the sell side in many capacities and has managed both bond and equity portfolios, and served as CEO, CIO and Research Director. He now distributes his views and recommendations on the global capital markets to institutional clients through The Coxe Strategy Journal, and a weekly conference call review. He continues to be advisor to the Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund and the Coxe Global Agribusiness Income Fund—two closed-end investment funds traded on the Toronto Stock As Strategy Advisor for BMO Financial Group from 1992 until 2012, he was frequently named as a top portfolio strategist by Brendan Wood International; in 2011, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award; he was ranked number one in the 2007, 2008 and 2009 surveys. He also received the lifetime achievement award from Canada's Financial Post. As CEO of a firm managing both bonds and stocks, he was consistently ranked among the top managers in Canada over the years from 1972 to 1983, when he moved from Waterloo, Ontario to Bay Street as Strategist and Research Director, and then to Wall Street and ultimately LaSalle Street as Global Strategist. Mr. Coxe has a broad background in public policy related to pension funds including serving on a Canadian Royal Commission and on the committee that advises on the Canada Pension Plan and has acted as expert witness before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on the operations of the Social Security Trust Fund. Mr. Coxe has a B.A. degree in modern history from the University of Toronto and earned his LL.B. degree from Osgoode Hall Law School. Don served six years on the Canadian Pension Plan Advisory Committee. He is proud of the fact that he analyzed why the CPP Fund was earning miserable interest yields on its loans to the provinces, and showed that the original rules set up in 1966 fixed yields on each tranche of issues based on “long-term Government of Canada bond yields.” But an informal agreement with the provinces in 1966 took the federal government out of the issuance of long-term bonds, so by 1974 the only outstanding long-term bond was a 3% Perpetual issued during the Depression. When the impact of this anomaly was reported, federal government immediately announced it would no longer be bound by the old arrangements, and began issuing torrents of long bonds, driving up yields on all new loans from the CPP to the provinces. Result: the CPP Fund’s financial strength was extended for many years. He also formed a committee to analyze the inequitable way CPP benefits were being distributed on divorce, and, after much political maneuvering, the government announced that CPP credits would be automatically split on divorce. This dramatic social policy change has been emulated in social programs in many other countries. In 1976 he resigned from the CPP committee to join the Advisory Committee on the Status of Pensions in Ontario, which published an 11-volume report in 1981. Its core recommendation was a mandatory modest contributory pension program. The report was quickly shelved, partly because the section on the financial outlook to which Don contributed predicted a coming fall in both inflation and interest rates, and some unions found this anathema.
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