anybody else.' -- Mr. Jack Carter Former US President Jimmy Carter's son, Mr. Jack Carter, has moved to Bermuda as international portfolio manager at INVESCO Global Asset Management Ltd.

(IGAM).

A hedging specialist and technical analyst, the southerner is so far finding cultural assimilation easy in Bermuda. He takes the bus to Hamilton from his St. George's home.

"I like the bus. I've always taken the bus. Even in Chicago, I took the train, the El train and get to work a lot quicker.'' His introduction to Bermuda came some six years ago, as a foreign exchange analyst in corporate dealings at Citibank, when he came here to see Citibank customer Bacardi Ltd.

IGAM involved the alliance of locally-owned fund manager Bermuda Asset Management (BAM) Ltd. and money management giant INVESCO Plc, earlier this year.

INVESCO, with $75 billion in assets under administration, has a handful of offices in the US, including headquarters in Atlanta, a significant presence in London, European offices including one in Moscow, and a presence in Hong Kong and Japan.

IGAM was set up to coordinate cross-border investments and model a global asset allocation policy.

Mr. Carter, 48, is secretary to the global asset allocation committee, dealing with the documentation of the allocation for the information of INVESCO's portfolio managers.

IGAM general manager, Mr. E. T. (Bob) Richards, himself the son of a former Bermuda Premier, Sir Edward Richards, is spearheading the local company's efforts to garner business from Bermuda's insurance industry.

BAM was a local company with $20 million in assets under administration that was founded by Mr. Richards in 1987, providing asset management services to Bermuda-based institutions, corporations and private clients.

Mr. Carter's background is diverse. He is a veteran of the Vietnamese war in which he served as an electronics man in the Navy. He studied physics at Georgia Tech and obtained a law degree from University of Georgia, before running a Georgia grain company.

From there he was off to the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) with food processor and grain giant, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) Company.

"They wanted me up there because I do hedging and interest rates,'' he said.

"From there I went to Continental bank and ran their board of trade operations. I traded at the board of trade for awhile, and then went to Citibank.'' He describes himself as a "born-again'' Christian. Not a fundamentalist, although he is from a family of deep-rooted Southern Baptists. Yet the latest St. George's family will be worshipping at historic, picturesque, and Anglican St. Peter's Church, the oldest Anglican Church in the western hemisphere.

The Plains, Georgia native looks at life philosophically, especially in terms of a career.

"I feel like I'm following a string. I take the path that interests me.

Interestingly, I abandoned very quickly physics and law. I wasn't that intrigued with the law. I went to law school because I wanted a general education. When I got through, I tried it and I found out pretty quickly I didn't particularly like it and was more attracted to the business side.

"In the grain business, you wind up putting together the two parts of the market that have always excited me -- one is the trading aspect, an analysis of which way the market is going to go. The other is the hedging aspect. The people who use the grain market are the ones who create a market that the speculators can come to.

"The market itself is a big risk transfer box. The people who don't want risk, put it in over on one side, and the people who want it, take it from the other side.

"Whether it is a futures market or a stock market or whatever, it's a risk transfer mechanism. That is the aspect of the market that has always intrigued me. It can be a stock risk, a price risk or an insurance risk. The risk takers then manage the risks for a period of time.

"So I started with grains, in terms of the risk transfer, which led me to the bond market, which was much bigger. People who transfer the risk are called hedges, the speculators. After figuring out how to do that, I got into the analysis, the risk taking side.

"Then I went to Citibank dealing in the foreign exchange markets, which was bigger than the bond markets. And then I was into the stock market. The equities markets are much more interesting than the commodities market, especially on an international level.'' He said: "I think, to me, over the first part of your life, you accumulate the tools you need. And then later on, you can apply them more and more.

Bermuda gives me a chance because it is at a crossroads of international business.

"There is a lot of business here, but because it is a crossroads, I think, it is going to grow some in the future.

"It gives me an ability to work in almost every continent. Then of course there are Bermuda's obvious charms -- the climate, the people and then the background. It made it very appealing to me. My wife (Elizabeth) is from Mississippi, so she was looking forward to this after living in Chicago.

"Settling into Bermuda has been very easy. A lot of the things that people have trouble with in some places, you don't have trouble here.

"But the day we were supposed to move in was the day hurricane Felix hit and a lot of our belongings were down on the wharf.'' The couple have four, college age children who live in the US.

Mrs. Carter had a 25-year career in banking. She was a consultant for Bank South, after working her way up to running one of the private banking areas for a Cleveland regional bank. She moved into the investment field with Merrill Lynch.

Her husband admits that being the son of a former US President can be both a help, and at times, a hindrance. He doesn't play up that angle at all.

"I think that overall it has been much more a help than a hindrance. There have been times when it has been a hindrance. I don't like to sign autographs.

"But on the other hand, it gives you a picture of the world which you might not get otherwise. I think what you really find out is how ordinary everybody is.

"I mean I grew up with my daddy and he is no more different from you than he is from anybody else. I guess there's always some little spark, but you wind up going around meeting a lot of people who are famous, or whatever. You realise they are just like ordinary people.

"What it means is that ordinary people can do those kinds of things, too.

Part of its luck, and part of it is desire, drive and those kinds of things.

"But as far as the particular attributes that famous people have, there are a lot of people who are as smart as my father. A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time, and having that drive and determination.'' Meanwhile, Mr. Carter said that there is an opportunity to build a significant product at IGAM.

"We have a model which decides roughly where we want to go with the money, and the individual people, in the different areas, decide which stocks, and those kinds of things.

"One of the advantages of international investing is that it is good diversification. The international economy does not necessarily follow the US economy. More and more portfolio managers of pension funds are moving toward international investment.

"And as the US becomes a smaller part of the share of world business, as other regions grow, the international side is going to become much more important in people's portfolio.''