David Hale, 64, an American economist who died last month, promoted Australia to a global audience and saw the rise of China and the re-emergence of "the great game" of shifting global power before most of his peers. 
Mr Hale came to Australia's attention in the 1980s as a regular on the ABC's The Carleton-Walsh Report and in the news pages of The Australian Financial Review, where he was regularly quoted after the 1985 commodity price and Australian dollar crises.
As an economist with Scudder Investments in New York, Zurich Financial Services, his own firm and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, he helped educate his audience about Australia's changing relations with the world's economic powers.
In the 1980s that meant the US, Europe and Japan. Later he chronicled the rise of China, its importance to Australia and the strengthening of ties between the US, Japan and India in response. He continued his media commentary on the ABC's Lateline and in the Financial Review's opinion pages.
"David knew more about our economy than many Australian economists, with his acute sense of what we needed to do at home to be competitive abroad," said Craig Emerson, a former trade minister in the Gillard Labor government and economic adviser to 1980s prime minister Bob Hawke.
Carol Austin, investment services director at Contango Asset Management and a guardian of the Future Fund, said Mr Hale was a prodigious writer and networker with a deep understanding of economic history.
"He really liked Australia. He visited often. He thought about Australia in a constructive way rather than as a foreigner giving an armchair view."
She said he loved frontiers and counted former US Federal Reserve governor Ben Bernanke, former prime minister Paul Keating and former Reserve Bank of Australia governor Ian Macfarlane among his many friends and acquaintances.
Mr Hale had a sophisticated view of the economy, said Mark Roeder, a former colleague at Zurich and David Hale Global Economics.
He loved the gold miners but saw beyond Australia's rich natural resource endowment "a country of tremendous intellectual and social capital" with a resilient banking system that survived the global financial crisis better than other Western countries. He died in Chicago on   October 19.