John Liscio died last week. John was our colleague at Barron's for roughly a half-dozen years in the late 'Eighties and early 'Nineties, and not a day went by that he didn't light up the place.
He was vibrant and funny, outrageous and irreverent, extraordinarily intelligent. He was brash and tough and had an insatiable appetite for mischief. Yet he was also warmly affectionate, shirt-off-his-back generous and, oddly, possessed of a touching ingenuousness.
John had an expansive mind that ranged restlessly and relentlessly over just about every subject known to literate and inquiring man and a few that only his special imagination provided entry to. He was a baseball nut, a cantankerous pitcher for and captain of Barron's softball team and a demon participant in the Fantasy League, where grown men play at being owner-managers of major-league teams. In fact, he was the commissioner of his league (in which role, we can only surmise, he visited great anguish on his fellow Fantasy Leaguers).
As a writer, John was exceptional. He brought to economics and markets a knowledge not only of those murky subjects but also of the wide world; a gifted and fluent pen and a sense of humor that could be -- inevitably was -- deliciously wicked. He would leap with positive glee on some unfortunate with a tempting name. There was a chap named LaWare at the Fed, for example, whom John inevitably and with some purpose called UnaWare. Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach was rarely mentioned by John but as the proprietor of the Roach Motel, where the facts check in but don't check out.
He was a brilliant journalist, both at Barron's and at U.S. News, and, against all advice and odds, launched an economic newsletter, the Liscio Report, which became a roaring success. The reason was simply that John had more wit in one pinky and more insight in the other than any dozen economists.
John, who was spunk personified, showed unbelievable courage as he battled his last illness. When we visited him in his hospital room and told him joshingly he looked like hell, he grinned that indomitable grin of his and launched into a couple of hours of dissertation on the state of the world, excitedly detailing his plans for the future.
He was the most indomitable person we've ever met. All of us here at Barron's and, for that matter, anyone lucky enough to have known him, will miss him terribly.