Pierre Rinfret, who died June 29 at 82, was the political novice who agreed to become the Republican standard-bearer against Mario Cuomo in 1990. It was said that he was chosen after 19 other potential candidates refused to run, and that his name was chosen almost at random, from some politico’s rolodex.

The ensuing election was among the messiest, and in some ways funniest, in New York history, beginning with Republican in-house newsletters that insisted on spelling Rinfret’s name phonetically (rin-FRAY) for party regulars who had never heard of him. Pronouncing his name correctly turned out to be one of the party’s few respectful gestures to its candidate.

Party leaders and Rinfret regularly traded barbs about financing, with the party accusing Rinfret of failing to raise the $10 million he had pledged to raise, or to spend a promised $250,000 of his own money. Rinfret accused the party of failing to support him. He called Republican officials “idiots,” and they countered by labeling him “a brainless wonder.” As for policy initiatives, Rinfret proposed to fight crime in New York City by giving weapons to vigilantes, and to save the subway system by selling it to private firms, which may not have been as crazy a notion as it was said to be at the time. At one point, a couple of weeks before Election Day, Rinfret threatened to drop out altogether and go yachting, because he found the pace too hectic.

Meanwhile, his name recognition in New York was so low that, six weeks before Election Day, a peripatetic reporter found that “he is still most commonly thought of not as a political neophyte, not as a maverick underdog, but as a French artist.”

Mr. Cuomo went on to win the election by a commanding 53-23% margin. But the fractious field included a separate Conservative Party candidate nipping at Rinfret’s heels who garnered 22% of the vote. The combined Conservative and Republican votes would have made the race closer, a fact not lost on political professionals, who fielded George Pataki as a winning unified candidate in the subsequent election.

For Rinfret, it was a suitably quixotic culmination to a maverick career that had seen him make millions in finance as a mutual fund manager and economic prognosticator. In 1970, by which time he had been an economic adviser to presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Time Magazine described Rinfret thus: “Take two parts of insight and three parts of gall. Combine with chunks of meaty research, season with flammable forecasts and serve sizzling on a sharpened verbal skewer.” One year later, though, he wrote a public statement in the Wall Street Journal in which he admitted “I was wrong” in declaring that in 1970 “there ain’t gonna be no recession.” It was a mark of his influence that readers cared.

Rinfret was born in 1924 in Montreal, the son of a Bronx-born mother and a French-Canadian father, a furrier who went bankrupt in 1929. As Rinfret tells the story on his Web site, the family disintegrated for several years, with the children living at times with various relatives in New York and Canada. Eventually, they settled in Queens, but the scars of poverty were deep.

He studied electrical engineering at the University of Maine, and was drafted into the Army in 1944, much decorated while serving in General Patton’s infantry division. He then earned an MBA from New York University, and spent two years in France on a Fulbright scholarship studying political economics. Returning to New York in 1951, he joined an investment firm, Lionel D. Edie and Co., where he began a rapid ascent.

He correctly forecast a 1957 recession, and when President Kennedy proposed a tax cut to stimulate growth, Rinfret was among the few conservatives to back him. Rinfret was named chairman of Lionel D. Edie in 1965, but left and in 1967 formed a new firm, Rinfret-Boston Associates. Soon thereafter, he became a close adviser to the future President Nixon, who offered him a position on the Council of Economic Advisers and later considered him for a cabinet post. During the 1972 campaign, he was a Nixon spokesman on economic affairs.

By the time he ran for governor, he was chairman of Rinfret Associates, an international economic consulting group. According to his son, Peter Rinfret, Pierre predicted the crash of 1987 in writing, made a fortune in the bond market, and continued to have a remarkable record prognosticating in matters of finance until his death.

In 1992, a city court found that Rinfret could not be held personally liable for his campaign debt, which amounted to about $300,000. He retired to a mansion in Nantucket, where he sailed his yacht, the Futures. He qualified as a pilot in 2000, at age 76, and liked to fly “everywhere” in his twin-engine Cessna 402.

Pierre Andre Rinfret

Born February 1, 1924, in Montreal; died June 29 of heart failure in Nantucket; survived by his wife of 57 years, Aida Marie Ceci; two children, Peter Alan Rinfet and Suzanne Rinfret Moore, and three grandchildren.