fearless Leadership

Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg isn’t unsettled
by TODAY’S economic uncertainties.
She’s just all the more determined to develop
smart strategIES for the long term.

By Sandra McElwaine

A sagging economy, gyrating stock market and talk of an impending recession do not faze Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg. She has survived these ups and downs before.
Just two weeks after Black Monday, October 19, 1987, the day the Dow plummeted a dizzying 508 points, the plucky Venezuelan-born, Harvard-educated economist flung open the doors to her brand new start-up, Strategic Investment Group. She formed the company with approximately $1 billion to create and implement global investment strategies for institutions, families, foundations, universities and extremely wealthy individuals.
At the same time she launched two other affiliates—Emerging Markets Investment Corp and Emerging Markets Management, both of which now oversee assets of $52 billion and offer global expertise in every aspect of investment, including US and foreign equities, real estate, hedge funds and private equity.
Black Monday was “terrifying,” she recalls while sitting in her sleek, modern office in Roslyn, Virginia encompassed by a stunning view of the entire city of Washington DC. “It was really horrendous. Everyone thought it was the end of the capitalist world as we knew it,” she says. “And there I was starting a business managing capital, which was disappearing very quickly.
“But that was the beginning of what has become very sophisticated risk management models because I knew then that things are never the way the seem. And there’s a silver lining somewhere for what’s happening.”
She still retains that optimistic view. “I still see value, not great but reasonable value, today. Our clients are fully invested and broadly diversified tilting towards large cap stocks with an under weighing in financial stocks. They can go up again very quickly. That’s our current MO,” she says.
At 62, with a dazzling resume, a personal fortune estimated between $300 and $500 million, and clients like the $210 billion California Public Employees Retirement System, one of the largest in the nation, Ochoa-Brillembourg is a titan of finance—at the top of her game. She serves on several prestigious boards, companies, organizations and non-profits, among them McGraw Hill, General Mills, The Harvard Management Company and the Fulbright Foundation. She also advises the Rockefeller Family Fund, and is Vice Chair of the Group of 50, a group of leading Latin American CEOs.
She has become a regular on the Washington social scene. Her picture along with her husband, Arturo, a financial analyst, is splashed all over the pages of a local glossy, attending embassy balls and benefits and rubbing shoulders with the rich and well-connected. She gives fancy dinners in her Georgetown home and also entertains at her farm on the tony, eastern shore of Maryland, where her neighbors include Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Some observers call her “ambitious, pushy, outspoken, determined to make her mark.” But Ochoa-Brillembourg downplays her high-profile existence, noting she is also very committed to many philanthropic causes, especially the Youth Orchestra of the Americas, and believes in giving back.
“Helping people who are deserving of help,” she says, when asked how she likes to use her time. “My hobbies are my causes. If I have a hobby, it’s the work of the soul. I’m not a collector of things.” Prodded, she reflects a moment further and comes up with, ”Movies, I love them. I think I’ve seen every movie there is to see—so I guess one of my hobbies is collecting movies.”
Tenacious and accomplished are probably the best words to describe this executive who has doggedly worked her way up from a modest childhood in Venezuela to the top of the world of high finance. She honed her entrepreneurial skills early on, making sewing kits and selling them to friends and family when she was just a child of 11 years old.
“I loved it. I made a lot of money,” she says,
By 16 she was working full time at the Ministry of Agriculture and attending University at night—but had no plans to become an economist. “I was obsessed with becoming financially independent—it was that was simple.
“I studied economics because I knew nothing about it, found no flaw in it and felt I could go anywhere in the world with it,” she says. “I did suspect Venezuela was a fragile society [and] that I might need to leave at some point. I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone. I felt the fear of poverty very poignantly when I was growing up. Whatever it took, I was going to get to the point where I could support myself.”
After graduation she worked for a public utility company, brushed up on her English and on a trip to the United States visited Boston and “fell in love” with Harvard. Determined to get in, she pursued the right contacts and literally talked her way into the John F. Kennedy School of Government from which she received her Masters degree in Public Administration.
In 1976, after a few years in Caracas and a first marriage hat didn’t work out, she took a chance and decided to work for the World Bank in Washington because she had met Arturo Brillembourg, a research economist with the International Monetary Fund.
“I thought, ‘Maybe this will work out with this guy,’ ” she explains.
It did. They have three children, and have been married for more than 30 years. It worked out professinally, as well. Ochoa-Brillembourg served as chief investment officer of the Pension Investment Division at the World Bank for 12 years and remains on their board.
Discussing the volatility of the present business climate, Ochoa-Brillembourg seems more sanguine than many of her Wall Street colleagues. She weighs the possibility of a recession.
“This cycle is not as stressful as others have been,” she notes. “There is stress, and I don’t want to sound glib, but the current cycle is not as malignant as it would seem at first blush or as in the 1973-74 period. I’m not particularly alarmed because we’re still in a world where there is abundant liquidity which is flowing in the direction where it is needed and because monetary and fiscal policies are helping liquidity flow.”
A proponent of the benefits of globalism—the efficient movement of money, goods, services and people—she predicts the economy will remain stagnant for the near future and voices concern about next year.
“The first year of a new presidential cycle is seldom good for the markets. The Fed might be tightening monetary policy next year to absorb some of the extra liquidity they are injecting in the markets now. Those processes are never easy, with a new president and uncertain policies looming ahead. Yeah, I am more concerned about 2009,” she says.
“I am hoping we will weather 2008 reasonably well. It will not be easy, it will be tricky, but I think we will be all right this year. High global liquidity and strong corporate balance sheets can help a lot.”
After 21 years at the helm of her own successful company she admits she has ultimately attained her goal.
“Yes,” she responds to a question about achieving independence. “I do feel independent. Sometimes you have to crawl on all fours to get there. I feel I have achieved what I wanted to, which was to manage my own life. I think that’s very important.”