A connection between Thompson and Iraqi war may sound familiar -- he discussed the topic on Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE five months ago. Based on data from 1991, RiskMetrics determined that in an Iraqi war, the least risky stocks might be General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Pfizer, while the riskiest ones might be AT&T, Lucent, Avaya and Citigroup. Thompson back in October also said that during "shock events" such as a war, actively-managed funds tend to outperform broad indices.

Since that broadcast, RiskMetrics has looked at how the stock market would be affected by a change in oil prices, which are currently at about $30 a barrel. If the per-barrel cost of oil drops to $20, RiskMetrics expects the S&P 500 to rise about 8 percent. According to the company's analysis, industries whose stocks could do particularly well if oil prices drop include restaurants and consumer finance.

RiskMetrics does provides analysis and research for financial institutions, corporations and central banks. The company was founded 1994 as a division of J.P. Morgan, and became an independent company in 1998.

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When the always-outspoken Riley appeared on Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE two months ago, he made it clear that he believed the markets were being held back because the Bush administration was too hawkish. But he's a bit more sanguine these days.

"Although I've been critical over the past three months about the means to the end, I am optimistic that we will eventually have one peace dividend returned and the United States will overcome the numerous maelstroms inhibiting its progress," Riley says in his latest commentary for State Street Global Advisors. "Maybe it is faith based that I remain optimistic about our long-term prosperity. Or maybe just a fool. But, barring any major calamitous events, I still believe this remains a period of opportunity."

Two months ago, he was already optimistic about technology stocks. On our Jan. 17 broadcast, he cited technology leaders Dell, Intel and EMC as appealing investments, and at least so far, he's been on target: those three stocks have been rising all year, outperforming the S&P 500 and Nasdaq.

Riley develops active fundamental investment policy for State Street Global Advisors clients that are funds or rich individuals, and often appears as a commentator on financial news programs.

Before State Street hired Riley in 2000, he was BankBoston's chief investment officer, where he oversaw investment policy for $32 billion in assets under management, and was responsible for a staff of more than 100 people. Riley was also a member of BankBoston's Investment Management Committee. He managed the Boston 1784 Funds, with $10 billion in assets. While at BankBoston, Riley was president and operating officer of Eagle Investment Associates, a financial counseling firm for rich people and small institutions.

Riley has worked in the investment management field since 1967. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from Providence College.

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On the surface, NorthRoad's founders couldn't have a picked a worse time to start a new investment company. But maybe the company's principals have good reason to be confident, given their track record.

For instance, Saba managed Lazard Asset Management's International Select fund to an average annual return of 9.5 percent from 1996 to 2002, easily besting the international benchmark Morgan Stanley EAFE's gain of 1.6 percent over the same period. It's the kind of performance that convinced several members of the Lazard international team to set up their own shop in July of last year.

NorthRoad's managers say they tend to ignore short-term events such as the current Iraqi situation and concentrate on a small group of large companies with strong underlying businesses. "Return on equity is more resilient than you might estimate," reads a NorthRoad letter from March.

NorthRoad's focus on companies with a market capitalization greater than $10 billion and with an average 5-year return on equity of more than 10 percent limits investment possibilities to about 200 stocks. NorthRoad says its portfolios -- the company currently has three -- consist of 25 to 40 stocks, each bought with a 5-year investment period in mind. Turnover within a NorthRoad portfolio is designed to be less than 20 percent a year.

You have to be rich to buy into NorthRoad: minimum investment is $5 million, according to the Financial Times.

Saba was an international portfolio manager at Brandes Investment Partners before Lazard hired him. Other former jobs include vice president for corporate finance at Nesbitt Burns. Saba received an MBA from the University of Chicago.

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The current Bush administration may already be bidding out contracts to American companies for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, but the think tank named after the old Bush administration's secretary of state believes the United States should take a back seat in the endeavor.

"U.S. should play a supporting, not a leading, role in political and economic reconstruction," the Baker Institute declared in December. A panel sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Baker Institute concluded that Iraqis should head rebuilding efforts. And it believes the United Nations should play a strong role, despite that organization's reluctance to support the war itself.

The Baker panel may or may not be correct, but in any case, few people have better credentials to support a Middle East thesis than Djerejian.

Eight presidential administrations have employed Djerejian, whose overseas work includes stints as U.S. ambassador to Israel in 1993; assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 1991 to '93; ambassador to Syria from 1988 to '91; deputy assistant secretary of Near Eastern and South Asian affairs from 1986 to 1988; special assistant to the president and deputy press security of foreign affairs in 1985; and deputy chief of the U.S. mission to Jordan from 1981 to 1984. From 1962 to 1981, he had various posts in the U.S. Foreign Service, including work in Beiruit from 1966 to 1969 and Casablanca from 1969 to 1972.

Djerejian received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 1994, the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award in 1993, and the President's Meritorious Service Award in 1988. He is a member of a number of public policy organizations, including the Council on Foreign Relations, and is founding director of Rice University's Baker Institute, where he has been since 1994.

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If there's one field of science that can't stay out of the political arena, it's economics. And few economists underscore that more than Stiglitz, one of the three men to share the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics.

His ideology has informed his economic views from the very beginning:

"I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely," Stiglitz wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Nobel organization. "My mother's family were New Deal Democrats -- they worshipped FDR; and though my uncle was a highly successful lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, he was staunchly pro-labor."

Stiglitz makes no secret about his political bent. One of his earliest research papers was "The Distribution of Income and Wealth Among Individuals" -- a favorite topic of left-wing policy wonks in America, although, as Stiglitz notes, the subject hasn't received much attention from economists. He went on to spend much of the 1970s and 1980s working on the "economics of information" with a particular focus on markets with "asymmetric" information -- that is, markets in which one side has much better data than the other. The Nobel committee honored Stiglitz for his work that showed how asymmetric information explains economic phenomena such as unemployment and credit rationing, and affects transactions such as insurance sales.

But Stiglitz's interests also included the economics of the public sector and market limitations. And he found himself drawn to some high profile lawsuits, including one filed in the 1980s against the federal government to prevent the sales of offshore oil tracts to prive companies. Eventually, his economics and public policy work garnered him a different kind of recognition: a political job. President Bill Clinton appointed Stiglitz to the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 1992; Stiglitz became the group's chairman in 1995.

The International Monetary Fund in 1997 hired Stiglitz to be the World Bank's chief economist, a position he held until 2000. He ultimately found the experience frustrating, since he disagreed with the IMF's policy of forcing developing countries to undergo rapid privatization, speedy liberalization of capital markets and tight money supplies.

Although Stiglitz has left Washington, D.C. and gone back to academia, he still wears his politics on his sleeve and remains active in policy discussions. The New York Review of Books last month published a Stiglitz article in which he described the Bush administration's handling of the federal budget as "an astonishing feat of fiscal mismanagement."

Before Columbia, Stiglitz taught at Stanford, Princeton, Oxford and the MIT, among other schools.

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