Reserve Bank of Australia governor Glenn Stevens and his predecessor Ian Macfarlane have paid tribute to American economist David Hale, describing him as one of Australia's only serious international friends during the 1980s and 1990s. 
The high-profile analyst died in   October in Chicago a month before he turned 64, leaving a legacy of helping to educate global investors about Australia's changing place in the global economy at a time of major structural change that ranged from floating the currency to the rise of China.
Mr Stevens described Mr Hale as "a remarkable individual" who pursued an "extraordinarily wide set of interests" thanks to an incredible ability to retain facts and explain them.
"He had an interest in Australia that went well beyond the norm that would be expected of a global analyst like that. I seem to recall someone described him as an economic version of the Strategic Air Command - always circling the globe, touching down only briefly in one far-flung place after another."
Mr Hale first appeared before Australian audiences as a regular on the ABC's The Carleton-Walsh Report and in The Australian Financial Review in the 1980s, when he was among the first to warn that the 1985 commodity price collapse would upend Paul Keating's budget settings.
Mr Macfarlane, who often met Mr Dale during his visits, said he was probably the world's premier economic analyst and writer of the 1990s, not least because he had a profound knowledge of economic history, "which was rare for economists".
"He was particularly prominent during the Asian crisis [of 1997-98], when he made a lot of sense, in our view," said Mr Macfarlane, RBA governor between 1996 and 2006.
"We didn't agree completely with the IMF and US Treasury's view of the world, and neither did David. When Thailand, Indonesia and Korea got into trouble, the IMF solution was the same sort of things they'd applied in Latin America, which was to tighten fiscal and monetary policy."
Mr Dale's insight was that the Asian crisis wasn't caused by inappropriate fiscal or monetary policies - as was often the case in South America - but because they became so popular to foreign investors that too much money flowed in. "It was really an asset boom and bust," he said. "He wrote a lot of stuff that was very favourable to Australia at a time when virtually everyone else appeared to ignore Australia or viewed Australia as a basket case, which we were in the 1970s."
Mr Macfarlane cited a mid-1990s front cover of The Economist, which questioned whether Australia would become the "next Mexico" following that country's currency crisis.