You could say that Meyer knows a bit about the economy.

In a field where prediction is notoriously tricky, Meyer is a rarity -- he's actually been right a few times. In 1986, he was the top forecaster on Business Week's panel. And twice in three years, 1993 and 1996, Meyer won the Blue Chip Forecasting Award, given annually to the most accurate prognosticator among a panel of 52 contributors.

That record convinced President Bill Clinton to nominate him to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where Meyer worked from June 1996 until January 2002.

Before joining the Fed, Meyer ran a St. Louis-based economic consulting firm specializing in macroeconomic forecasting and policy analysis, and was a professor of economics at Washington University, where he was also a research associate of the Center for the Study of American Business.

Meyer has been an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He received a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1965 and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970.

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As chief economist and co-founder of Economy.com, Zandi is recent years has become one of the most frequently-quoted economic experts in the United States. Hardly a week goes by where he isn't quoted by some media outlet or another.

And what does he see for this year? Among other things, Zandi fears the impact of an Iraqi conflict on energy prices and confidence. However, he believes that if the war is quickly resolved by summer and some type of federal stimulus package is passed, Gross Domestic Product will grow about 3 percent. He expects joblessness to remain at about 6 percent by year end as well.

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Gateway Fund, the flagship of Rogers' company, has never looked as good as it has since the bear market began. Then again, it's always looked like a solid investment under his management.

"Rogers has proven himself very capable since taking over the fund in 1994," reads a Morningstar report from December. "We think this fund would make a good addition to the portfolios of conservative investors."

The secret to Gateway's consistency? Hedging with options. Although the fund's core holdings are S&P 500 stocks, it sells put and call options as needed to smooth things out, which makes it an ideal holding for bear markets. Gateway Fund has outperformed the S&P 500 easily in each of the past three years, with a total return of 6.6 percent in 2000, and relatively small declines of 3.5 percent and 4.9 percent in 2001 and 2002, respectively.

Gateway Investment Advisers hired Rogers in 1989. He has been president, chief investment officer and a board member since 1995. He manages the Gateway Fund, Cincinnati Fund and Gateway VIT Fund. And he's the president and a trustee of The Gateway Trust and the president of the Gateway Variable Insurance Trust.

Before joining Gateway, Rogers was a personal adviser to trust clients at LaSalle National Bank in Chicago and a financial consultant at Shearson Lehman Brothers where he specialized in conservative equity strategies. Rogers received a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from Xavier University, where he received the Martin B. Friedman Award given annually to the school's most outstanding MBA student.

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Even without his 21st century work, Gary Gensler would be able to say he has done well. He spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, making partner before he was 30, becoming head of the company's fixed income and currency trading operation in Tokyo by the mid-'90s, and eventually the company's co-head of finance. As the Treasury Department's undersecretary for domestic finance in the last two years of the Clinton administration, Gensler found himself in the unique position of overseeing the single largest pile of debt in the world; at one point, SmartMoney listed Gensler as the 22nd most influential person the financial world.

That would be a career apex for many people, but Gensler arguably didn't accomplish his most influential work until last year, when he was one of the chief authors of legislation that eventually became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to overhaul corporate America. Oh, and he managed to co-write a book, The Great Mutual Fund Trap, whose main thesis is that active trading and investing is a bad thing for individuals.

In the view of Gensler and co-author Gregory Baer, people who invest in stocks should stick with index and exchange-traded funds, because actively-managed vehicles and individual stock pickers generally underperform the broad market in the long run. It is, in many ways, a reiteration of what efficient market theorists and index fund proponents such as John Bogle have been arguing for decades; Gensler and Baer go into detail about how fund management fees, broker commissions, taxes and other hidden costs reduce the returns for active traders.

Gensler twin brother Robert probably disagrees -- Rob Gensler runs an actively-managed fund for T. Rowe Price.

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Rob Gensler -- whose twin brother Gary is also a guest on this week's program -- is president and investment advisory committee chairman of the T. Rowe Price Media and Telecommunications Fund, which he has managed since January 14, 2000, just a couple of months before the bear market started. Given the situation, Gensler has done well -- according to Morningstar, the T. Rowe Price fund outperformed its sector average in each of the past three years. Gensler even managed to beat the S&P 500 in 2001, despite one of the worst years ever for telecom stocks.

"All told, this is one of our favorite telecom funds around," Morningstar analyst Jeffrey Ptak wrote in November.

The T. Rowe fund has stayed ahead of its sector peers this year in part because of a heavy reliance on traditional, stable, cash-rich names. At the end of December, 40 percent of the fund's assets were in media stocks, with Viacom as the single largest holding, followed by Verizon, Liberty Media and Cisco Systems.

Gensler has been with T. Rowe Price since 1993, when he was hired from his analyst job at Salomon Brothers. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Stanford University.

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