NABE's 50th Annual Meeting
Addressing Future Economic Challenges
Confirmed speakers include:
Lakshman R. Achuthan
Economic Cycle Research Institute
Lakshman Achuthan is co-founder and managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), an independent organization focused on business cycle analysis and forecasting in the tradition established by ECRI’s founder, Geoffrey H. Moore. ECRI maintains business cycle chronologies for 18 countries around the world other than the U.S.
He is also the managing editor of ECRI’s forecasting publications and regularly participates in a wide range of public economic discussions.
He is a member of Time magazine’s board of economists, the New York City Economic Advisory Panel, The Levy Economics Institute’s Board of Governors and serves as trustee on a number of non-profit boards.
Lakshman is the co-author of Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy published by Doubleday.
Martin Neil Baily
The Brookings Institution
Martin Baily, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration (1999–2001) and one of three members of the council from 1994 to 1996, focuses on issues of globalization, productivity and competitiveness, Social Security reform, and U.S. economic policy at the Brookings Institution.
Martin Baily re-joined Brookings in September 2007 to develop a program of research on business and the economy. He is studying issues of productivity, technology, globalization and trade and exploring the impact of new technologies on the economy.
Dr. Baily is also a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company, assisting the McKinsey Global Institute on projects on globalization and productivity. He is an economic adviser to the Congressional Budget Office and a Director of The Phoenix Companies of Hartford CT.
Prior to his return to Brookings, Baily was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. His book Transforming the European Economy was published by the Institute in 2004. In August 1999, Dr. Baily was appointed as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. As Chairman, Dr. Baily served as economic adviser to the President, was a member of the President’s Cabinet and directed the staff of this White House agency. He completed his term as Chairman on January 19, 2001. During that period he also served as President of the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Dr. Baily previously served as one of the three Members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from October 1994 until August 1996.
Dr. Baily was a Principal at McKinsey & Company at the Global Institute in Washington, D. C. from September 1996 to July 1999. He was also a visiting fellow at the Global Institute l993-1994. Dr. Baily helped lead project teams using industry case studies to explore service and manufacturing productivity and employment, as well as a series of country studies, looking at France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Brazil, Korea and Russia. Dr. Baily has also worked with McKinsey client teams, providing counseling to CEO’s on economic issues.
Dr. Baily earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After teaching at MIT and Yale, he became a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in 1979 and a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland in 1989. His research has focused on wage setting, macroeconomic policy, innovation, productivity and economic growth.
He has served as an academic advisor to the Federal Reserve Board and testified numerous times before Congress. He served on a panel convened by the Office of Technology Assessment and was the Vice-Chairman of a panel of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council to investigate the effect of computers on productivity. He was a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the author of many professional articles, and the co-author or editor of five books.
Sheila Bair
Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Sheila C. Bair was sworn in as the 19th Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on June 26, 2006. She was appointed Chairman for a five-year term, and as a member of the FDIC Board of Directors through July 2013.
Before her appointment to the FDIC, Ms. Bair was the Dean's Professor of Financial Regulatory Policy for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst since 2002. Other career experience includes serving as Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (2001 to 2002), Senior Vice President for Government Relations of the New York Stock Exchange (1995 to 2000), a Commissioner and Acting Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1991 to 1995), and Research Director, Deputy Counsel and Counsel to Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (1981 to 1988). While an academic, Chairman Bair also served on the FDIC's Advisory Committee on Banking Policy.
Chairman Bair's prior work focused heavily on the banking sector. As the Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions, she was charged with helping to develop the Administration's positions on banking policy issues. She worked closely with Treasury's own banking regulatory bureaus, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision, as well as the Federal Reserve Board and the FDIC. Ms. Bair's teaching and research at the University of Massachusetts also dealt extensively with banking and related issues.
Ms. Bair has served as a member of several professional and nonprofit organizations, including the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association, Women in Housing and Finance, Center for Responsible Lending, NASD Ahead-of-the-Curve Advisory Committee, Massachusetts Savings Makes Cents, American Bar Association, Exchequer Club, and Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
Five months after becoming Chairman, Ms. Bair was named to The Wall Street Journal magazine Smart Money's (November 2006) “Power 30” list – the magazine's lineup of the 30 most influential people in investing. Chairman Bair has also received several honors for her published work on financial issues, including her educational writings on money and finance for children, and for professional achievement. Among the honors she has received are: Distinguished Achievement Award, Association of Education Publishers (2005); Personal Service Feature of the Year, and Author of the Month Awards, Highlights Magazine for Children (2002, 2003 and 2004); and The Treasury Medal (2002). Her first book – Rock, Brock and the Savings Shock, a publication for children – was published in 2006.
Chairman Bair received a bachelor's degree from Kansas University and a J.D. from Kansas University School of Law. She is married to Scott P. Cooper and has two children.
Linda Barrington
The Conference Board
Linda Barrington is Labor Economist, Research Director at The Conference Board.
Barrington directs workforce and human resources research as Research Director of the Management Excellence Program of The Conference Board. Her current research projects include benchmarking workforce diversity, analysis of the relationship between productivity and workforce diversity, and assessing issues surrounding the maturing worker and other workforce challenges.
Barrington has authored several Conference Board publications including: CEO Challenge, 2004: The Top 10; Executive Action Report: Is Leadership a Luxury?; Does A Rising Tide Lift All Boats? America’s Full-Time Working Poor Reap Limited Gains in The New Economy; and Perspectives on a Global Economy: Are Poor Nations Closing the Gap in Living Standards? Her recent presentations include: “Global Workforce Trends: Demographics and U.S./E.U. Productivity”; “Technology, Opportunities and Challenges of the New Economy: Global Position, Domestic Concerns”; “Workforce Diversity and Productivity: Analyzing Employer-Employee Data”; “Census 2000: A Snapshot of America”; “Changing Demographics—Poverty Risk for Full-time Workers in the New American Economy”.
Barrington has appeared on numerous news programs including National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, NBC Nightly News and Bloomberg.
Before joining The Conference Board, Barrington was on the faculty of the Economics Department of Barnard College of Columbia University. There she published several articles on gender economics, poverty measurement and economic history. Barrington received her B.S. in economics from the University of Wisconsin, and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois.
Ben Bernanke
Chairman, Federal Reserve Board
Ben S. Bernanke was sworn in on February 1, 2006, as Chairman and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Dr. Bernanke also serves as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policymaking body. He was appointed as a member of the Board to a full 14-year term, which expires January 31, 2020, and to a four-year term as Chairman, which expires January 31, 2010.
Before his appointment as Chairman, Dr. Bernanke was Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, from June 2005 to January 2006.
Dr. Bernanke has already served the Federal Reserve System in several roles. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002 to 2005; a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia (1987-89), Boston (1989-90), and New York (1990-91, 1994-96); and a member of the Academic Advisory Panel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1990-2002).
From 1994 to 1996, Dr. Bernanke was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He was the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and Chair of the Economics Department at the university from 1996 to 2002. Dr. Bernanke had been a Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton since 1985.
Before arriving at Princeton, Dr. Bernanke was an Associate Professor of Economics (1983-85) and an Assistant Professor of Economics (1979-83) at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His teaching career also included serving as a Visiting Professor of Economics at New York University (1993) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1989-90).
Dr. Bernanke has published many articles on a wide variety of economic issues, including monetary policy and macroeconomics, and he is the author of several scholarly books and two textbooks. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Bernanke served as the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as a member of the NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee. In July 2001, he was appointed Editor of the American Economic Review. Dr. Bernanke's work with civic and professional groups includes having served two terms as a member of the Montgomery Township (N.J.) Board of Education.
Dr. Bernanke was born in December 1953 in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina. He received a B.A. in economics in 1975 from Harvard University (summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in economics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Bernanke is married and has two children.
RIchard Brown
FDIC
Richard Brown is the Chief Economist and Associate Director for Risk Analysis at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He has held a succession of research and management positions at the FDIC and other federal banking agencies between 1985 and 2002.
For NABE, he has bee:n NABE Director, 2006-07; Financial Roundtable, Vice Chair, 2005-06, Press Officer, 2004-05; NABE National Capital Chapter, President, 2000-01.
He has a BA, economics, University of Cincinnati and aPh.D. economics, The George Washington University.
Guy F. Caruso
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Guy F. Caruso Mr. Caruso is Senior Advisor to the Energy and National Security program at CSIS.
From 2002 until September 2008 Caruso was the Administrator of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a statistical agency within the United States Department of Energy (DOE) that provides policy-independent data, forecasts and analyses regarding energy. Mr. Caruso has acquired over 30 years of energy experience, with particular emphasis on topics relating to energy markets, policy and security. Mr. Caruso first joined DOE as a Senior Energy Economist in the Office of International Affairs and soon became the Director of the Office of Market Analysis. Other leadership roles held by Mr. Caruso during his tenure at DOE include: Director, Office of Oil and Natural Gas Policy, Office of Domestic and International Energy Policy and Director, Office of Energy Emergency Policy Evaluation.
Prior to joining DOE, Mr. Caruso worked at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an International Energy Economist in the Office of Economic Research. Mr. Caruso also previously served as the Executive Director of the Strategic Energy Initiative Project, under the Energy and National Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) . CSIS is a private, nonpartisan organization dedicated to providing world leaders with strategic insights on, and policy solutions, to current and emerging global issues.
Moreover, before joining EIA, Mr. Caruso was also the Director of the National Energy Strategy (NES) project for the United States Energy Association (USEA). During this time, Mr. Caruso spearheaded the USEA publication "Toward a National Energy Strategy," which was released in February 2001 and a follow-up study entitled, "National Energy Strategy Post 9/11" which was released in July 2002. Mr. Caruso has worked at the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), first as the Head of the Oil Industry Division where he was responsible for analyzing world oil supply/demand and developments in the oil industry; and later, as Director of the Office of non-members Countries where he directed studies of energy-related developments.
Mr. Caruso holds a B.S. in Business Administration and an M.S. in Economics from the University of Connecticut. He also earned a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University.
Abby Joseph Cohen
Goldman Sachs
Abby is President of the Global Markets Institute and senior investment strategist. She serves on the firm’s Investment Retirement Committee. She became a partner in 1998 and has served on the Partnership Committee.
Abby joined Goldman Sachs in 1990 having specialized in quantitative strategy and economics at other major financial firms. She began her career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC.
Abby’s extracurricular activities focus on education and public policy. She serves as a presidential councillor at Cornell University and on the boards of the Weill Cornell Medical College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Brookings Institution. She previously served as chair of the board of the AIMR, now known as the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute, from which she received the Distinguished Service Award. Abby serves on the investment committees of Cornell University and Major League Baseball. She is on the board of the Council for Excellence in Government, the national board of the Smithsonian Institution, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Abby is a frequent guest lecturer at several universities and graduate schools of business.
Abby holds degrees in economics from Cornell University and The George Washington University. She has received three honorary doctorates, including one in engineering. Abby has been recognized as a leader in US portfolio strategy for more than 15 years, and has been ranked No. 1 by Institutional Investor magazine and Greenwich Associates. Her career is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study and a BusinessWeek cover story. She has been honored by many groups, including the Financial Women’s Association, New York Stock Exchange, the Wall Street Week Hall of Fame and leading financial publications.
Robert H. Dugger
Tudor Investment Corporation
Robert Dugger is Managing Director of Tudor Investment Corporation. He was previously director for policy and chief economist at the American Bankers Association, leading a panel of nationally recognized bank officers in developing a plan to deal with the U.S. savings and loan crisis. Dugger served as the chief economist of the Senate Banking Committee and senior staff member of the Financial Institutions Subcommittee of the House Financial Institutions Committee. Dugger began his career at the Federal Reserve Board. He is a member of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine's Strong Start pre-kindergarten council and recently served as co-chairman of Governor John Warner's Virginia Early Learning Council. He is a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development and chairman of the Invest in Kids Working Group and the Partnership for America's Economic Success. Dugger received a bachelor's degree from Davidson College and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mark J. Finley
BP America, Inc.
Mark Finley is General Manager, Global Energy Markets and US Economics at BP. He is responsible for BP's long- and short-term analysis of global energy markets. He also manages the annual production of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy--a well-known resource on global energy data now in its 57th year. He regularly presents BP’s views on global energy markets to external audiences.
Mark chairs the American Petroleum Institute’s Committee on Economics and Statistics. He is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics and is an elected member of the US Conference of Business Economists.
Mark has more than 20 years of private- and public-sector experience as an energy economist; he joined BP's Economics Team in 2001. He holds graduate degrees in Economics and Finance. Mark and his wife Leigh Ann live in Arlington, VA with their two very cute daughters.
Gary Gensler
Representative for the Obama Campaign
Gary Gensler was Undersecretary of the Treasury (1999-2001) and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1997-1999) in the United States.
Gary Gensler spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, making partner when he was 30, becoming head of the company's fixed income and currency trading operation in Tokyo by the mid-'90s, and eventually the company's co-head of finance.
As the Treasury Department's undersecretary for domestic finance in the last two years of the Clinton administration, Gensler found himself in the position of overseeing policies in the areas of U.S. financial markets, debt management, financial services, and community development.
Subsequent to his time at the Treasury he acted as a Senior Advisor to Senator Paul Sarbanes, one of the authors of legislation that eventually became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to bring greater oversight to the accounting industry and reform of corporate governance.
Gensler is the co-author of a book (with Greg Baer), The Great Mutual Fund Trap. The thrust of the book is that active trading and investing is an inefficient strategy for individual investors, and that individuals should stick with index and exchange traded funds.
Coincidentally, Gensler has a twin brother Robert Gensler who runs an actively-managed fund for T. Rowe Price. Gensler also has three daughters, Anna 17, Lee 16, and Isabel 11. Mr. Gensler serves on the board of for-profit university Strayer Education, Inc. He also was senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Howard Gruenspecht
U.S. Energy Information Administration
Howard Gruenspecht was named as Deputy Administrator of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) in March 2003. Over the past 25 years, Dr. Gruenspecht has worked extensively on electricity policy issues, including restructuring and reliability, regulations affecting motor fuels and vehicles, energy-related environmental issues, and economy-wide energy modeling. Before joining EIA, he was a Resident Scholar at Resources for the Future. From 1993 to 2000, Dr. Gruenspecht served as Director of Economic, Electricity and Natural Gas Analysis in the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Policy, having originally come to DOE in 1991 as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic and Environmental Policy. His accomplishments as a career senior executive at DOE have been recognized with three Presidential Rank Awards.
Prior to his service at DOE, Dr. Gruenspecht was Senior Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers (1989-1991), with primary responsibilities in the areas of environment, energy, regulation, and international trade. His other professional experience includes service as a faculty member at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie-Mellon University (1981-1988), Economic Adviser to the Chairman of the U.S. International Trade Commission (1988-1989), and Assistant Director, Economics and Business, on the White House Domestic Policy Staff (1978-1979).
Dr. Gruenspecht received his B.A. from McGill University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1982.
Robert Hall
Stanford University
Robert E. Hall is an applied economist with interests in employment issues, technology, competition, and economic policy in the aggregate economy and in particular markets. His current research focuses on levels of employment and output in market economies and on the economics of high technology.
Hall is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He presented the Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association in 2001 and served as the Association’s Vice President in 2005.
Along with Hoover Institution colleague Alvin Rabushka, Hall developed a framework for equitable and efficient consumption taxation. Their article in the Wall Street Journal in December 1981 was the starting point for an upsurge of interest in consumption taxation. The proposal is spelled out in more detail in their book, The Flat Tax (Hoover Institution Press). The pair were recognized in Money magazine's Money Hall of Fame for their contributions to financial innovation. Hall is coauthor, with Marc Lieberman, of Economics: Principles and Applications.
Hall also serves as director of the research program on economic fluctuations and growth of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an interuniversity research organization. He is chairman of the Bureau's Committee on Business Cycle Dating, which maintains the semiofficial chronology of the U.S. business cycle.
Hall has advised a number of government agencies on national economic policy, including the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Congressional Budget Office, where he serves on the Advisory Committee. He served on the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity. He has testified on numerous occasions before congressional committees concerning national economic policy.
Before coming to Stanford Department of Economics in 1978, Hall taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Palo Alto, he attended school in Palo Alto and Los Angeles, received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967.
Hall is married to economist Susan Woodward, chairman of Sand Hill Econometrics, and lives in Menlo Park, California.
Kevin Hassett
American Enterprise Institute
Kevin Hassett directs economic policy studies at AEI. His research interests include tax policy, the U.S. economy, the stock market, and investments. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and the chief economic adviser to Senator McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries. He currently serves as a senior economic adviser to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign. He has also served as a policy consultant to the Treasury Department during the former Bush and Clinton administrations.
Erik Heitfield
Federal Reserve Board
Erik Heitfield is a Senior Economist in the Risk Analysis Section, Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. His fields of interest include Banking and Financial Institutions, Risk Management, and Econometrics and Statistics. He has been at the Board since 1998.
His publications include: ''Systematic and Idiosyncratic Risk in Syndicated Loan Portfolios'' (with Steve Burton and Souphala Chomsisengphet), Journal of Credit Risk, vol. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 3-31; ''Risk Sensitive Regulatory Capital Rules for Hedged Credit Exposures'' (with Steve Burton and Souphala Chomsisengphet), in Michael Pykhtin, ed., Counterparty Credit Risk Modelling: Pricing, Risk Management and Regulation. London: Risk Waters Group, 2005; and 'What Drives Default and Prepayment on Subprime Auto Loans?'' (with Tarun Sabarwal), Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, vol. 29 (December 2004), pp. 457-77.
He has a B.S., Economics, George Mason University, 1991 and a Ph.D., Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 1998.
Devon Herrick
Senior Fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis
Chair, NABE Health Economics Roundtable
Devon Herrick, Ph. D., concentrates on health care issues, such as Internet-based medicine, health insurance and the uninsured, as well as pharmaceutical drug issues. Other areas which Dr. Herrick focuses on include managed care, patient empowerment, medical privacy and technology-related issues.
Dr. Herrick has been responsible for the NCPA's computer and information services, as well as oversight of the design and maintenance of the NCPA's award-winning Web site - Idea House. He has training in financial analysis and health economics, and has conducted several major research projects for the NCPA, having published several research studies and papers on health policy. Herrick is a sought-after speaker on health policy issues.
Prior to joining the NCPA, Dr. Herrick was a research assistant at the Bruton Center for Development Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. The Bruton Center integrates geographic information systems, spatial analysis, and exploratory data analysis in the social sciences, applying research on trends, forces, and public policy. In addition, he spent six years working in health care accounting and financial management for a Dallas-area health care system.
Dr. Herrick received a Ph.D. in Political Economy and a Master of Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Dallas with a concentration in economic development. Dr. Herrick's dissertation research examined patient empowerment through empirical analysis of the Internet and disease advocacy.
He also holds an MBA with a concentration in finance from Oklahoma City University and an MBA from Amber University, as well as a BS in accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma.
David Heuther
National Association of Manufacturers
David Huether is Chief Economist of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) where he serves as the organization’s economic forecaster as well as a principal spokesman on economic matters important to America's industrial base. Before coming to the NAM in 1997, he worked as an economist with the Bureau of Economic Analysis at U.S. Department of Commerce.
David received his undergraduate degree from Guilford College (North Carolina) in 1990 and his graduate degree in economics from George Washington University in 1997.
Sydney Smith Hicks
NABE Corporate Planning Roundtable Chair
Sydney Smith Hicks is currently a professional director and consultant. She serves on the board of Smart Start, Inc, an ignition interlock company. Smart Start produces ignition interlock devices, franchises nationally, currently in over 25 states, and is the largest company in its industry. Prior to her current focus, she was CEO of VECTORsgi, Inc. and Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy, for Metavante Corporation. VECTORsgi is a financial technology software and services company which Hicks sold to Metavante in November 2004. Its products and services are sold primarily to the top 125 banks in the U.S. Metavante is a $1.5B company delivering banking and payments technologies to financial services firms and businesses worldwide.
Hicks was CEO of VECTORsgi, Inc., from 2003 to 2006, where she was responsible for maximizing business performance and strategically guiding the growth and expansion of VECTORsgi. Under Hicks’ leadership VECTORsgi expanded product lines, increased sales, and generated increasing levels of profits. Prior to the acquisition by Metavante, VECTORsgi was owned by management and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners; Hicks was also a Board Member. Investors tripled their investment over 15 months.
Before VECTORsgi became private, Hicks was senior vice president of Sterling Commerce and CEO of the Banking Systems Division of Sterling Commerce, the predecessor of VECTORsgi. During Hicks’ tenure, she set the strategy to transform the company from mainframe technologies to distributed technologies. With the advent of Check 21, her company was positioned with new products, allowing the company to capture the market for image exchange. For more than six years prior to being CEO, she was vice president of Operations and Business Development where she led new business development, supervised product acquisitions and was responsible for managing the strategy, design, development, maintenance, installation services, training services, and customized consulting for 11 product solutions, containing over 50 products. Hicks joined Banking Systems as Director of Marketing for Item Processing Solutions in 1996.
Prior to Sterling Commerce, Hicks gained an extensive knowledge of banking and electronic transactions at NationsBank, a predecessor of Bank of America, where she served as senior vice president of Transaction Solutions and Image Initiatives. Hicks was chief economist for NCNB (and First Republic and InterFirst), financial economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and a visiting scholar for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. During her career, she was on the board of the Electronic Check Clearing House Organization (ECCHO), was the founding chairman of the board of Payment Systems Network (PSN), now owned by The Clearing House Payments Company, and held various academic positions.
Hicks is currently on two not-for-profit boards in Dallas, is a Mentor/Advisor for STARTech Early Ventures, and is Chair of the Corporate Planning Committee of the National Association of Business Economists. Locally she has led several boards and organizations over the last 25 years, including IWFDallas.
Hicks earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate in Economics from Washington University (St. Louis). She also has a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Cornell College (Iowa), where she graduated with distinction in economics. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Cornell College’s Berry Center for Economics, Business, and Public Policy.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin
Adviser to Senator McCain
Douglas Holtz-Eakin is currently Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Policy Director of John McCain 2008. Dr. Holtz-Eakin most recently served as the Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to that, Dr. Holtz-Eakin served as the sixth Director of the Congressional Budget Office, where he was appointed for a four-year term beginning February 4, 2003. Dr. Holtz-Eakin previously served for eighteen months as Chief Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Prior to that, Dr. Holtz-Eakin served as a Trustee Professor of Economics at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. At the Maxwell School, he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics and Associate Director of the Center for Policy Research.
Michael Horowitz
Medical Insights International
Dr. Horowitz is Founder and President of Medical Insights International, a firm devoted to researching and analyzing medical tourism, and providing valuable information to parties involved or interested in this industry.
Dr. Horowitz provides critical insights regarding the marketplace forces that drive and shape the evolving medical tourism industry as well as anticipated business trends and opportunities. He has a strong interest in the marketplace dynamics and macroeconomic underpinnings of medical tourism. His experience and perspective as a seasoned physician provide deep understanding of the issues of quality of care, patient safety and accreditation. Dr. Horowitz has visited key medical tourism destinations. He is a sought-after speaker and has given many professional presentations on medical tourism for audiences from the healthcare community and medical tourism industry. He is the author of numerous articles on various aspects of medical tourism.
A graduate of the University of Miami School of Medicine, Dr Horowitz completed specialty training in Surgery and in Cardiothoracic Surgery. Dr. Horowitz was on the faculty of the University of Miami School of Medicine from 1988 to 1993. Next, he developed and managed a cardiac surgery program in a community-based hospital that previously did not have these services. He is a Diplomate, Fellow or member of numerous professional medical and surgical organizations.
Dr. Horowitz received an MBA with concentration in Organization and Management from the Goizueta Business School of Emory University in 2006. He has been elected to membership in Beta Gamma Sigma International Business Honor Society.
Gene Huang
FedEx Corporation
Gene Huang is Chief Economist for FedEx and a Managing Director of the company’s Economic and Industry Analysis Group. He is responsible for forecasting global economic and financial conditions. Gene tracks and monitors all industries served by FedEx.
Gene is a member of the Blue Chip Consensus Panel, which provides the economic consensus used by policy makers as well as the business community, the Wall Street Journal Economic Panel and BusinessWeek Magazine’s Business Outlook Panel. In 2002, Gene was profiled in BusinessWeek as its“Most Accurate Forecaster”. He credits his forecasting success to the “front row seat” that FedEx provides him in global Supply Chain Management. Gene is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE).
Gene began his corporate career in 1987 with a Wall Street money management firm. Since then he has worked for some of the largest industrial corporations and most prestigious research institutions in the U.S. and Japan, including Eaton Corporation, General Motors Corporation, ICSEAD in Japan, and Wharton School’s Economic Research Unit.
Gene received his M.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds a law degree from Fudan University in Shanghai.
He is the author of two books in business economics and many articles published in U.S., Japanese, and European economic and policy journals. Gene is frequently interviewed by leading news journals in the U.S. and has made appearances on Bloomberg TV as an economic commentator. He has also occasionally served in an advisory capacity to U.S. Federal Government agencies and international organizations.
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick
Ford Motor Company
NABE President
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick is a director and chief economist at Ford Motor Company. She joined Ford in 1996, and now directs the corporate economics group with major responsibility for the company’s global economic and automotive industry forecasts. Prior to joining Ford, she was a senior economist at Mellon Bank from 1990 to 1996, and assistant professor of economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, during the late 1980s. She served for two years as a staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan Administration. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame, a master’s degree in international development, and a PhD in economics at Clark University in Massachusetts. She was recently appointed to the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisers.
For the previous four consecutive years, Ellen has served as co-chair of NABE’s Annual March Policy Conference held in Washington, DC.
Sara L. Johnson
Global Insight
Sara Johnson is Managing Director of Global Macroeconomics with Global Insight, Inc. In this role, she helps Global Insight’s clients assess worldwide business and financial opportunities and risks. Global Insight provides economic forecasts and analyses of 204 countries as well as research studies of critical economic issues. She was previously North American Research Director and Chief Regional Economist with Standard & Poor’s DRI, a predecessor of Global Insight. As research director, she managed the U.S. Macro, U.S. Regional, U.S. Industry, Cost Forecasting, and Canadian services and served on Standard & Poor’s five-member Economic Council.
Ms. Johnson holds a B.A. degree in economics and mathematics from Wellesley College and an M.A. in economics from Harvard University with concentrations in finance and macroeconomic theory.
From 1991 to 2001, Ms. Johnson served on the Governor’s Economic Council, advising three Massachusetts governors on public policy and economic development and chairing the Governor's Task Force on Tax Policy and Capital Formation through 1999.
Ms. Johnson is a director of the National Association for Business Economics and a member of The Boston Economic Club and American Economic Association.
Joseph Kennedy
Economic Statistics Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce
Kevin Kliesen
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Kevin L. Kliesen is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he has been employed since October 1988. He came to the Bank after graduating from Colorado State University with an M.A. in Economics. As a business economist, the bulk of his duties comprise reporting on and analyzing current U.S. and international macroeconomic developments and trends. Previously, he was part of the Research Department's Regional Economics group.
In that capacity, he monitored developments in the automotive, agricultural, and natural resources sectors. In his capacity as a business economist, he writes the Bank's monthly Report on Economic Activity, an internal report on general economic conditions, which is prepared prior to each Board of Directors meeting. An important aspect of this position also involves speaking to the general public about the U.S. economy, monetary policy developments and the economic outlook. Besides writing for the Regional Economist, a quarterly publication written for a nontechnical audience, he also writes for the Review, which is the Bank's peerreviewed economic journal. He has also written for professional economics journals, and he has authored several book reviews.
He is a member of the American Economic Association and the National Association for Business Economics (NABE). He was President of the St. Louis Gateway Chapter of NABE from 1999 to 2000. He has served as a member of the Board of the Directors of the national NABE organization. In addition to his interests in business economics and monetary policy, he is also interested in the long-term fiscal problems facing the United States.
Kalpana Kochhar
International Monetary Fund
Kalpana Kochhar is a Deputy Director in the Asia and Pacific Department since August 2008. Prior to taking this position, she spent time in the IMF’s Research Department, and seven years in the Asia and Pacific Department leading IMF consultation missions to India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia. She has also worked on China, Korea and the Philippines. During her Fund career, she has also worked in the Policy Development and Review department and in the Fiscal Affairs department.
Ms. Kochhar’s research interests and publications have mainly focused on studies of Asian economies, including India and China. Most recently, her research has focused on issues related to India’s growth, and fiscal policies. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from Brown University and an M.A. in Economics from Delhi School of Economics in India. She has a B.A in Economics from Madras University in India.
Laurence Kotlikoff
Boston University
Laurence J. Kotlikoff is Professor of Economics at Boston University, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and President of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company specializing in financial planning software. Professor Kotlikoff received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1977. From 1977 through 1983 he served on the faculties of economics of the University of California, Los Angeles and Yale University. In 1981-82 Professor Kotlikoff was a Senior Economist with the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Kotlikoff has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swedish Ministry of Finance, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the Government of Russia, the Government of Ukraine, the Government of Bolivia, the Government of Bulgaria, the Treasury of New Zealand, the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Joint Committee on Taxation, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, The American Council of Life Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, AT&T, AON Corp., and other major U.S. corporations. He has provided expert testimony on numerous occasions to committees of Congress including the Senate Finance Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Joint Economic Committee. Professor Kotlikoff is author or co-author of 13 books and hundreds of professional journal articles. His most recent book, co-authored with Scott Burns, is forthcoming with Simon&Schuster and is entitled Spend ‘Til the End. Professor Kotlikoff publishes extensively in newspapers, and magazines on issues of deficits, generational accounting, the tax structure, social security, Medicare, health reform, pensions, saving, insurance, and personal finance.
Paul Krugman
Princeton University
Paul Krugman has at least three jobs: he is professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and, perhaps, his best-known job, as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In recognition of his influence The Washington Monthly called him “the most important political columnist in America.”
In addition, Krugman’s reputation extends well beyond the U.S. The Asia Times recently called him “the Mick Jagger of political/economic punditry.” The Economist said he is “the most celebrated economist of his generation.” And, recently Mr Krugman received what is often called the European Pulitzer Prize, the Asturias Award given by the King of Spain.
Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 professional journal articles, many of them on international trade and finance. In recognition of his work, he received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association, an award given every two years to the top economist under the age of 40.
For the past 20 years, Krugman has written extensively for non-economists, including a monthly column, “The Dismal Science,” for the on-line magazine Slate. He has also been a columnist for Fortune and has published articles in The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, before joining The New York Times.
Prior to his appointment at Princeton, Krugman served on the faculty of MIT ; his last post was Ford International Professor of Economics. He also taught at Yale and Stanford Universities, and prior to that he was the senior international economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, under Ronald Reagan. (Yes, he served under a conservative President.)
He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Group of Thirty. He has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, as well as to a number of countries including Portugal and the Philippines.
His most recent book is THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL. His previous work, THE GREAT UNRAVELING, was highly praised and became a New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback. Mr. Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, have recently collaborated on two college textbooks -- Microeconomics published in October 2004, and Macroeconomics published in the September 2005.
Krugman and his wife live in the Princeton area with their two cats.
Edward Lazear
Council of Economic Advisers
Edward P. Lazear was confirmed by the Senate on February 17 and sworn in as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers on Monday, February 27, 2006. Before coming to the Council of Economic Advisers, he was a member of President Bush’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform.
Lazear is on leave of absence from Stanford University where he is the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics (1995) and the Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He taught previously at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. He is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is on leave as a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Testing and Assessment. Lazear was the first vice-president and president of the Society of Labor Economists, as well as the founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and founder of two companies.
Lazear developed research and ideas that became the seminal work in the area of “personnel economics,” a field that married economics and statistics to organizational behavior. He has written or edited nine books.
Among his more than one hundred published papers, the following are of special note: “Speeding, Terrorism, and Teaching to the Test” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2006); “The Peter Principle: A Theory of Decline,” Journal of Political Economy (2004); “Economic Imperialism,” for the millennium issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000); “Culture and Language,” Journal of Political Economy (12/99); “Educational Production,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2001); “Performance, Pay and Productivity,” American Economic Review (12/00); “Peer Pressure and Partnerships,” with Eugene Kane, Journal of Political Economy (8/92); “Labor Economics and the Psychology of Organization,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 1991); “Job Security Provisions and Employment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (8/90); “Pay Equality and Industrial Politics,” Journal of Political Economy (6/89); “Salaries and Piece Rates,” Journal of Business (7/86); “Retail Pricing and Clearance Sales,” American Economic Review (3/86); “Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts,” with Sherwin Rosen, Journal of Political Economy (10/81); “Why is There Mandatory Retirement?” Journal of Political Economy (12/79); “Personnel Economics: Past Lessons and Future Direction,” Presidential Address to the Society of Labor Economists, Journal of Labor Economics (1999); and “Globalization and the Market for Teammates,”; Frank Paish Memorial Lecture to the Royal Economic Society, Warwick, England, Economic Journal (1999).
Lazear’s many academic prizes and awards include the 1998 Leo Melamed Biennial Prize for outstanding research, the 2003 Adam Smith Prize from the European Association of Labor Economists, the IZA Prize in Labor Economics from the Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, the Distinguished Teaching Award from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 1994, and the Distinguished Service Award from Stanford University in 2002. He has an honorary doctorate from Albertson College of Idaho and delivered the 2002 UCLA Commencement Address.
Lazear has advised many governments throughout the world including Russia, Romania, Republic of Georgia and Ukraine and recently was a member of Governor Schwarzenegger’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Born in 1948, Professor Lazear grew up in Los Altos, California. He received his A.B. and A. M. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He is married and has one daughter.
Wei Li
Darden School of Business
University of Virginia
Dr. Li is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia. He is also a Professor of Economics at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, a private business school in China. He also served on the faculty of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Dr. Li is an expert on the Chinese economy and markets. He has published research findings on the causes and effects of major economic policy changes in China, behaviors of Chinese firms, valuation puzzles in China’s financial market, and differential growth and transition experiences between China and other emerging economies. He has also done research work on financial markets in emerging economies and played a leading role in organizing the annual Darden Conference on Emerging Markets Finance. His research has been published in academic journals including Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Journal of Law & Economics, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Comparative Economics, and Emerging Markets Review. He is also a co-author of the book, Investing in Emerging Markets. Professor Li teaches Global Economies and Markets and Emerging Markets Finance in MBA and MBA for Executives programs and related topics with an emphasis on China in executive education programs.
Steve Liesman
CNBC
As CNBC’s Senior Economics Reporter, Steve Liesman reports on all aspects of the economy including the Federal Reserve Bank and major economic indicators. He appears on "Squawk Box" (M-F, 6-9 a.m. ET), as well as other CNBC programs throughout the Business Day. Liesman joined CNBC from The Wall Street Journal where he served as a senior economics reporter covering monetary policy, international economics, academic research and productivity. At the Journal, Liesman previously worked as an energy reporter and, from 1996-98, as the Journal’s Moscow bureau chief. He was a member of the reporting team recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for stories chronicling the crash of the Russian financial markets. Prior to joining the Journal in 1994, Liesman was the business editor for The Moscow Times, where, as the founding business editor for the country’s first English language daily newspaper, he helped create the publication’s stock index, which was the country’s first. Liesman has also worked as a business reporter for both the St. Petersburg Times in St. Petersburg, Fl., and The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fl. Liesman holds a Masters of Science from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in English from the State University of New York, Buffalo.
John Lipsky
International Monetary Fund
John Lipsky assumed the position of First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund on September 1, 2006.
Before coming to the Fund, Mr. Lipsky was Vice Chairman of the JPMorgan Investment Bank. In this position, he advised the firm's principal market risk takers, published independent research on the principal forces shaping global financial markets, was actively engaged with JPMorgan's key clients, and represented the firm around the world with senior public and financial sector decision makers.
Previously, Mr. Lipsky served as JPMorgan's Chief Economist, and as Chase Manhattan Bank's Chief Economist and Director of Research. He served as Chief Economist of Salomon Brothers, Inc. from 1992 until 1997. From 1989 to 1992, Mr. Lipsky was based in London, where he directed Salomon Brothers' European Economic and Market Analysis Group.
Before joining Salomon Brothers in 1984, he spent a decade at the IMF, where he helped manage the Fund's exchange rate surveillance procedure and analyzed developments in international capital market. He also participated in negotiations with several member countries and served as the Fund's Resident Representative in Chile during 1978-80.
In 2000, he chaired a Financial Sector Review Group, established by former Managing Director Horst Köhler, to provide the IMF with an independent perspective on the Fund's work on international financial markets.
Mr. Lipsky's current professional activities include serving on the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining the IMF as First Deputy Managing Director, Mr. Lipsky served as a Director of several corporations and non-profit organizations.
A graduate of Wesleyan University, Mr. Lipsky earned a bachelors degree in economics. Subsequently, he was awarded an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.
Stuart Mackintosh
Group of 30
Stuart P. M. Mackintosh is the Executive Director of the Group of Thirty (G30). The G30 is a nonprofit, an international body composed of very senior representatives of the private and public sectors and academia. It aims to deepen understanding of international economic and financial issues, to explore the international repercussions of decisions taken in the public and private sectors, and to examine the choices available to market practitioners and policymakers. Mr. Mackintosh oversees all aspects of the G30 annual work program, its development and fundraising.
Previously Mr. Mackintosh was a Washington-based economist and country risk manager for Mitsubishi International Corporation. In that role he initiated a weekly U.S. economic forecast and commentary for senior executives. Other responsibilities included conducting country risk analyses of Central Asian states and Russia. Before locating to the U.S., Mr. Mackintosh was Chief of Staff and principal speechwriter for leading politicians in the European Parliament.
Mr. Mackintosh is Chairman of the Board of the National Economists Club, a 500 member chapter of the National Association for Business Economics. He is a Director of International Roundtable of NABE. Mr. Mackintosh has as B.A. from University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a M.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh.
Christopher L. Magee
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Christopher L. Magee is the Director of the Center for Innovation in Product Development and a Professor of the Practice of Engineering Systems and Mechanical Engineering all at MIT. He has held these positions since January 2002. Prior to this, Dr. Magee had 35 years of experience at Ford Motor Company ranging from early research and technology implementation work to later executive positions in Product Development emphasizing vehicle systems and program initiation activities.
Dr. Magee has a Ph.D. in Metallurgy & Materials Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a MBA from Michigan State University. Professor Magee’s current research focuses on the innovation and change process in complex systems. His teaching subjects include product development, complex system modeling and systems engineering. He has been a participant on major National Research Council Studies whose topics span Design Research to Materials Research. Dr. Magee is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ASM and a Ford Technical Fellow.
Catherine L. Mann
Brandeis University
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Catherine L. Mann is a professor at the International Business School at Brandeis University, where her specialties include Empirical International Trade And Exchange Rates, Globalization Of Information Technology And Venture Capital, and Information Technology And Development
She has also been a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics since 1997. Previously, she served as assistant director of the International Finance Division at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, senior international economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers at the White House, and adviser to the chief economist at the World Bank.
She is author or coauthor of two books that focus on the policy foundations for effective use of technology for domestic development and external competitiveness. APEC and the New Economy (2002) was presented to and endorsed by APEC Leaders at their meeting in Shanghai, China. Global Electronic Commerce: A Policy Primer (2000) uses general analysis and specific examples from field research in more than 10 countries to address how the Internet and electronic commerce affect policymaking, with particular focus on infrastructure and policy issues of taxation, privacy, security, intellectual property, and trade negotiations. In addition she directs a project funded by the Ford Foundation to support collaborative research comparing Asian and Latin American countries on how technology affects entrepreneurship, government, education and skills, and financial intermediation. She has delivered keynote speeches and engaged in projects on technology and policy in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, as well as in Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, and New Zealand.
She also studies broader issues of US trade, the sustainability of the current account, and the exchange value of the dollar. Published in 1999, Is the US Trade Deficit Sustainable? answers perennial questions about the impact of global integration on the US economy and the dollar. A Journal of Economic Perspectives (2002) article reviews concepts of sustainability, including the role of international financial markets and international trade in services, topics also addressed in "How Long the Strong Dollar?" in Dollar Overvaluation and the World Economy, edited by John Williamson and C. Fred Bergsten, and in "The US Current Account, New Economy Services, and Implications for Sustainability" in the Review of International Economics.
She received her PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her undergraduate degree is from Harvard University.
James Meil
Eaton Corporation
James P. Meil is chief economist with Eaton Corporation, a global diversified industrial manufacturer with 2007 annual sales of $13 billion.
At Eaton Corporation, he is responsible for forecasts of economic conditions and for the markets Eaton serves in auto, truck, electrical, construction, fluid power & aerospace. He is a panel member for Blue Chip, Consensus Economics, USA Today, Philadelphia Fed Reserve & Wall Street Journal outlook surveys.
Meil won 1st-place recognition in the Wall Street Journal panel of 50 forecasters for 2004, ranked among USA Today’s “Top 10 Economic Forecasters of 2003”. He is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Finance Association, the Auto Market Research Council, the National Business Economic Issues Council and the Conference of Business Economists. He formerly served on the board of directors of the National Association for Business Economics.
Fareed Mohamedi
PFC Energy
Fareed Mohamedi is a Partner of PFC Energy. He is Head of the Markets and Country department practice, which houses PFC Energy's expertise in country risk and petroleum sector policy. Fareed also manages PFC Energy's oil market analysis team and its global economics team. He helped develop PFC Energy's expertise on national oil companies and the unique challenges they face.
Fareed has been at PFC Energy since 1990. He has also worked at Moody's Investors Service as the lead country analyst for a number of petroleum and gas producing countries, at the Institute of International Finance in the Middle East and Asia departments, at the World Bank's Africa department, at Wharton Econometrics Forecasting Associates' Middle East service and at the economic research section of the Ministry of Finance and National Economy in Bahrain. In the 1970s, he managed several parts of his family business which had branches in Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Fareed holds an M.A. in Arab Studies from the Center For Contemporary Arab Studies at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University and a B.A. in Economics from Western Michigan University.
Martha Moore
Moore Economics
Michael Mussa
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Michael Mussa, senior fellow since 2001, served as Economic Counselor and Director of the Department of Research at the International Monetary Fund from 1991-2001, where he was responsible for advising the Management of the Fund and the Fund's Executive Board on broad issues of economic policy and for providing analysis of ongoing developments in the world economy. By appointment of President Ronald Reagan, Mussa served as a Member of the US Council of Economic Advisers from August 1986 to September 1988. He was a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago (1976-91) and was on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Rochester (1971-76). During this period he also served as a visiting faculty member at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the London School of Economics, and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Mussa's main areas of research are international economics, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and municipal finance. He has published widely in these fields in professional journals and research volumes. He is author of Argentina and the Fund: From Triumph to Tragedy (2002) and editor of C. Fred Bergsten and the World Economy (2006).
Rudolph Penner
The Urban Institute
Rudolph G. Penner is a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute and holds the Arjay and Frances Miller chair in public policy. Previously, he was a Managing Director of the Barents Group, a KPMG Company. He was Director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1983 to 1987. From 1977 to 1983, he was a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Previous posts in government include Assistant Director for Economic Policy at the Office of Management and Budget, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Senior Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisors. Before 1975, Mr. Penner was a professor of economics at the University of Rochester.
He was elected president of the American Tax Policy Institute in 2005 and is past President of the National Economists Club. In 1989, he received the Abramson Prize for the best article published in 1988-89 in Business Economics and more recently received a prize for the best article published in 2002 in Public Budgeting and Finance. In 2004, he chaired a Commission on Metro Financing for the Washington Metropolitan Area Council of Governments and others and is currently co-chairing a Committee on the Fiscal Future for the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Public Administration.
Mr. Penner was born in 1936 and raised in Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Toronto and his PH.D. in economics is from the Johns Hopkins University.
He is the author of numerous books, pamphlets and articles on tax and spending policy and has authored columns for various newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. His most recent book, co-authored with Isabel Sawhill and Timothy Taylor, is Updating America's Social Contract.
Mr. Penner lives in Washington, DC, and his wife, Alice, is a psychiatric social worker. They have two sons, Eric and Brian and five grandchildren.
Edmund Phelps
McVicker Professor of Political Economy, Columbia University
Edmund S. Phelps is McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, director of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Science and both a Distinguished Fellow and a former Vice-President of the American Economic Association. This year he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, won the Premio Pico della Mirandola for humanism and the Kiel Global Economy Prize. His research has spanned economic growth, including the Golden Rule of saving, microeconomic foundations of inflation and employment dynamics, structuralist models of unemployment determination, dynamism and inclusion in capitalist and corporatist systems, and the good economy.
Edmund Phelps joined the Department of Economics at Columbia in 1971 after several years at Pennsylvania and earlier Yale. He was named McVickar Professor of Political Economy in 1982. He is the 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Phelps’s work is best known for introducing in the late ’60s an expectations-based microeconomics into the theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. Keynes’s great work of the ’30s had left it unexplained why involuntary unemployment is observed even in the best of times and why a drop of aggregate “effective demand” causes a rise of unemployment – why not a prompt fall of money wages and prices by just enough to forestall a fall of employment? The challenge was to resolve these issues while continuing to posit the elementary rationality that economics traditionally ascribed to workers, consumers and firms.
Phelps was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 1981 and was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2000. He is also a former vice-president of the Association, a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1978, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Science in 1969-70 and visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 1993-94. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (1959). In 1985 he was awarded an honorary degree from his alma mater, Amherst College. In June 2001 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Mannheim and from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” in October 2003 from Universidade Nova Lisboa, in July 2004 from University of Paris Dauphine and in October 2004 from the University of Iceland. He was made an honorary professor at the Renmin University, Beijing, in May 2004. An international Festschrift in his honor was held at Columbia University in October 2001 and the 600 page conference volume was published by Princeton University Press in 2003 (Knowledge, Information and Expectations in Modern Economics P. Aghion, R. Frydman, J.E. Stiglitz and M. Woodford, eds.) He also holds honorary doctorates from the Institut d'Etudes des Sciences Politiques de Paris (2006) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (2007.)
William Poole
Cato Institute
Distinguished Scholar in Residence, University of Delaware
William Poole is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, Senior Advisor to Merk Investments and, as of fall 2008, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Delaware.
Poole retired as President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in March 2008. In that position, which he held from March 1998, he served on the Federal Reserve’s main monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee. He directed the Bank’s main office in St. Louis and its three branches in Memphis, Little Rock and Louisville.
Before joining the St. Louis Fed, Poole was Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He served on the Brown faculty from 1974 to 1998 and the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University from 1963 to 1969. Between these two university positions, he was senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the first Reagan administration, from 1982 to 1985.
Poole received his AB degree from Swarthmore College in 1959, and MBA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1963 and 1966, respectively. Swarthmore honored him with the Doctor of Laws degree in 1989. He was inducted into The Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2005 and presented with the Adam Smith Award by the National Association for Business Economics in 2006. In 2007, the Global Interdependence Center presented him its Frederick Heldring Award.
Poole has engaged in a wide range of professional activities, including publishing numerous papers in professional journals. He has published two books, Money and the Economy: A Monetarist View, in 1978, and Principles of Economics, in 1991. During his 10 years at the St. Louis Fed, he gave over 150 speeches on a variety of topics. In 1980-81, he was a visiting economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and in 1991, Bank Mees and Hope Visiting Professor of Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. At various times, he served on advisory boards of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, and the Congressional Budget Office.
Poole was born and raised in Wilmington, DE. He is married to Geraldine Poole; they have four sons.
Sara B. Potter
Factset
Sara joined FactSet Research Systems in 1999 and is currently the Associate Director for FactSet’s Economic Database Development group. Previously, Sara was a U.S. Economist with Toyota Motor Corporate Services of North America and an Associate Economist at Standard & Poor’s DRI (now Global Insight). Sara received an M.A. in International Economics and Finance from Brandeis University and holds a B.A. in Economics and French from Dartmouth College. She is a CFA charterholder.
Lynn Reaser
Bank of America Investment Strategies Group
Lynn Reaser, Ph.D., is chief economist and managing director for the Investment Strategies Group at Bank of America. This group currently manages investments of around $440 billion on behalf of individual and institutional clients of the Wealth and Investment Management Group.
In her current role, Dr. Reaser is responsible for tracking and forecasting economic trends and evaluating their effects on financial markets. She follows international, national, and regional developments, and plays a key role in helping shape the bank’s investment strategy. She is thus an advisor to both the Private Bank, which offers a full range of financial services to high-net-worth individuals and families, and other units of Wealth Investment Management, which furnishes retail brokerage services throughout the country.
Dr. Reaser conducts about 500 interviews a year with newspapers, magazines, radio, and television stations located in the United States and other parts of the world. She also has served in a number of government advisory positions. In addition, she has consulted with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Board of Governors in her role as chair of the American Bankers Association’s Economic Advisory Council.
Dr. Reaser, who was born in Los Angeles, holds a doctorate, a master's and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Harvey Rosenblum
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Harvey Rosenblum is executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In this capacity, he serves as economic policy advisor to the Bank's president and as an associate economist for the Federal Open Market Committee, which formulates the nation's monetary policy.
Rosenblum is also a past president and a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), a prestigious trade association whose 3,000 members are the leading business economists in the United States and many other countries. Past presidents of NABE include several Federal Reserve presidents as well as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Rosenblum is currently serving as Executive Director of the North American Economics and Finance Association. He also is a member of the Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board, appointed by the governor of Texas.
A widely recognized expert on both the national and Texas economies, Rosenblum has written articles for such publications as The Journal of Finance, New York Times, Southwest Economy and The Handbook of Banking Strategy.
Active in economic education, Rosenblum is a visiting professor of finance at Southern Methodist University, teaching courses in contemporary issues on monetary policy and financial institutions and markets.
Rosenblum received a B.A. in economics from the University of Connecticut in 1965 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1972.
He began his career with the Federal Reserve in 1970 as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, advancing through the ranks to vice president and associate director of research in 1983. He was also a visiting professor of finance with DePaul University from 1973 until 1985. He joined the Dallas Fed as senior vice president and director of research in 1985 and was promoted to executive vice president in 2005.
His current research interests focus on monetary policy, inflation and the growing impact of globalization on the U.S. economy and businesses.
Jeffrey Sachs
Columbia University
Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.
He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.
In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007. Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University.
Brian Sack
Macroeconomic Advisers
Brian Sack is Senior Economist and Vice President at Macroeconomic Advisers. As Deputy Directory of the Monetary Policy Insights service he collaborates with Dr. Meyer on all aspects of the service. Dr. Sack joined the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in 1997 and became the head of the Monetary and Financial Market Analysis section in 2003. In that capacity, he directed the Federal Reserve Board’s analysis of various segments of U.S. fixed-income markets, including Treasuries, swaps, and interest rate futures. Those efforts focused on interpreting and predicting the influence of economic and monetary policy developments on the yield curve and other asset prices, as well as on extracting information from market prices that was relevant for policy decisions. Dr. Sack’s position at the Board placed him as a crucial contributor to the staff’s support of the FOMC. He and his section worked extensively on the Greenbook and the Bluebook prepared by the staff, and on numerous other documents addressing relevant topics for FOMC decisions. Dr. Sack worked closely with FOMC members, including extensive research projects with Governor Kohn and Governor Bernanke. Dr. Sack has published a number of research papers on issues related to monetary policy decisions and the fixed income markets. Specific topics have included estimating monetary policy rules, measuring the effects of FOMC communications, assessing the impact of monetary policy decisions on asset prices, and evaluating the behavior of Treasury inflation-indexed debt. His papers have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, the Journal of Fixed Income, and the Journal of Futures Markets. Dr. Sack received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1997.
Kenneth D. Simonson
Associated General Contractors of America
Ken Simonson joined AGC of America on September 10, 2001. Ever since Day Two he has been provided insight into what was happening to the economy and what it implied for construction and related industries.
Ken’s weekly one-page email newsletter for AGC, The Data DIGest, provides 6000 readers with the latest economic news relevant to construction. He also sends out a variety of state-specific and tax news. He is interviewed and quoted almost daily by local and national media, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Business Week, and CNBC. In addition, he has written eight booklets explaining tax provisions in plain English, and he contributes frequently to a variety of business and professional publications and conferences, including columns for Fleet Owner, a trucking magazine, and The Electrical Distributor.
Ken has 30 years of experience analyzing, advocating and communicating about economic and tax issues. Before joining AGC, he was senior economic advisor in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy and 13 years. Earlier, he was vice president and chief economist for the American Trucking Associations. He also worked with the President’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and an economic consulting firm.
Ken is a board member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and author of “Digging into Construction Data,” published in NABE’s journal, Business Economics. Since 1982, he has co-chaired the Tax Economists Forum, a professional meeting group he co-founded for leading researchers and policy makers among tax economists. He is vice president of Community Tax Aid, an organization that prepares returns for free for low-income taxpayers. He was one of the principal subjects of The Lobbyists, a bestseller by Jeffrey Birnbaum, now a writer for the Washington Post.
Ken has a BA in economics from the University of Chicago, an MA in economics from Northwestern University, and he has taken advanced graduate economics courses at the Universite de Paris, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.
Renee-Marie Stephano
Medical Tourism Association
Renee-Marie Stephano is a Founder and COO of the Medical Tourism Association, also known as MTA, the first international non-profit trade association for the medical tourism industry. Ms. Stephano also serves as general counsel for the MTA and is Editor of the Medical Tourism Magazine, a monthly journal that addresses all of the issues surrounding medical tourism including legal issues, accreditation, economic issues and a geographical focus on countries growing their business in treating foreign patients.
Ms. Stephano received her undergraduate degrees in international relations in Virginia and received her Juris Doctorate degree in Law in Pennsylvania. She has a background in international marketing and health law and then went on to open her own law firm, spending six years serving as general counsel for a US national healthcare administrator which was the first US healthcare administrator to implement medical tourism into both self-funded and fully insured health plans in the United States.
Ms. Stephano works full time for the Medical Tourism Association and is considered an expert in medical tourism on legal issues. In her role at the Medical Tourism Association, Ms. Stephano helps countries and hospitals create strategic marketing plans and helps identify target markets. She has helped many countries and hospitals achieve their goals of attracting foreign patients and international insurance companies. Ms. Stephano works with global health care providers to maintain transparency with respect to quality of care as they increase their flow of patients and she also works with medical travel facilitators to establish best practices to ultimately ensure patient safety.
Lawrence Summers
Harvard University
Lawrence H. Summers is President Emeritus of Harvard University, former Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, and in the past decade served in a series of senior public policy positions, including Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, from 1999 to 2000.
Having received a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, Mr. Summers began his Harvard career as a doctoral student in economics. He served, among other roles, as a resident tutor in Lowell House and a teaching fellow for Ec 10, the popular undergraduate economics survey course. After completing his dissertation, “An Asset-Price Approach to Capital Income Taxation,” he was awarded the Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982. By that time, he had taught for three years as an economics faculty member at MIT, where he was named assistant professor in 1979 and associate professor in 1982. He then went to Washington as a domestic policy economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
In 1983, he returned to Harvard as a professor of economics, one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the University’s faculty. In 1987, he was named Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy. While on the faculty, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in macroeconomics and public finance and was an adviser to numerous graduate students who have themselves gone on to become leading economists. He also served as an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Mr. Summers in 1987 became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (NSF), established by Congress to honor an exceptional young U.S. scientist or engineer whose work demonstrates originality, innovation, and a significant impact within one’s field. In 1993, Mr. Summers was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40.
Mr. Summers took leave from Harvard in 1991 to return to Washington, this time as vice president of development economics and chief economist of the World Bank. In that position, he played a key role in designing strategies to assist developing countries, served on the bank’s loan committee, and guided the bank’s research, statistics, and external training programs. His research featured an influential report demonstrating the very high return on investing in educating girls in developing countries.
In 1993, Mr. Summers was named as the nation’s Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. He had broad responsibility for assisting then Secretary Lloyd M. Bentsen in formulating and executing international economic policies. In 1995, then Secretary Robert E. Rubin AB '60 promoted Mr. Summers to the department’s number-two post, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, in which he played a central role in a broad array of economic, financial, and tax matters, both international and domestic. During this time, he worked closely with Secretary Rubin and Alan Greenspan LLD '99 (hon.), chairman of the Federal Reserve System, in crafting government policy responses to financial crises in major developing countries.
On July 2, 1999, the United States Senate confirmed Mr. Summers as Secretary of the Treasury. In that capacity, he served as the principal economic adviser to the President and as the chief financial officer of the U.S. government, presiding over a federal department comprising some two dozen distinct bureaus and offices, with a civilian workforce of nearly 150,000 employees.
As secretary, he helped engineer an historic pay down of U.S. debt, worked successfully to extend the life of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and led the effort to enact the most sweeping financial deregulation in 60 years. Internationally, he worked to reform the international financial architecture and the International Monetary Fund, to secure debt relief for the world’s poorest countries, and to combat international money laundering. At the end of his term as treasury secretary, Mr. Summers was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Medal, the treasury department’s highest honor.
After leaving the treasury department in January, Mr. Summers served as the Arthur Okun Distinguished Fellow in Economics, Globalization, and Governance at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
On July 1, 2001, Mr. Summers took office as the 27th president of Harvard University.
During his tenure as Harvard’s President, Mr. Summers focused on laying the foundations for the University into the 21st century. His ambitious plans encompassed significant growth in the faculties, the further internationalization of the Harvard experience, expanded efforts in and enhanced commitment to the sciences, laying the ground work for Harvard’s future development of an expanded campus in Allston, and improved efforts to attract the strongest students, regardless of financial circumstance, with the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. These initiatives were sustained by five years of successful fundraising and strong endowment returns, providing the University with unprecedented resources.
Upon the conclusion of his tenure as Harvard’s President, Mr. Summers plans to take a year of sabbatical leave from the University before returning to campus in 2007 to accept a position as a University Professor, an endowed position established in 1935 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College for "individuals of distinction ... working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties."
Mr. Summers’s many publications include “Understanding Unemployment” (1990) and “Reform in Eastern Europe” (1991, coauthored with others), as well as more than 100 articles in professional economics journals. He also edited the series “Tax Policy and the Economy.” In 2000, Mr. Summers was invited to present the American Economic Association’s prestigious Ely Lecture, in which he addressed "International Financial Crises: Causes, Preventions, and Cures."
In 2002, Mr. Summers was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare.
In 2006, Mr. Summers served as one of five Co-Chairs to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Additionally, Mr. Summers is a part time managing director of the D.E. Shaw Group, a member of the boards of the Brookings Institution, the Center on Global Development, the Institute for International Economics, the Global Fund for Children’s Vaccines, and the Partnership for Public Service. He holds membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bretton Woods Committee, the Council on Competitiveness, and the UNCTAD Panel of Eminent Persons.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, Mr. Summers spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and was educated in the Lower Merion public schools. He and his wife Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard, reside in Brookline with their six children.
Thomas Kevin Swift
American Chemistry Council
A native of Buffalo, New York, Dr. Swift is the chief economist at the American Chemistry Council (ACC) in Arlington, Virginia where he is responsible for economic and other analyses dealing with markets, energy, trade, tax and innovation, as well as monitoring business conditions and identifying emerging trends for the domestic and global chemical sector. He is an authority on the global chemical industry and his research and analyses are critical to decision-making by executives and business managers through out the industry. Dr. Swift disseminates economic and societal contributions of the business of chemistry and general information about the industry to ACC member companies, the media, Wall Street analysts, the academic community and the public in general.
Prior to joining the American Chemistry Council, Dr. Swift held executive and senior level positions at several business information/database companies, directing business research, forecasting, and consulting efforts, as well as domestic and international business forecasting services and related on-line databases. He also conducted single-client industrial market research and related projects. Dr. Swift started his career at Dow Chemical USA
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Dr. Swift is a member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and is a member of NABE's panel of 40 professional forecasters and chairs the NABE Manufacturing Roundtable. He is also a member of the Harvard Discussion Group of Industrial Economists and is a participant in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank's forecasters' survey. Dr. Swift is a member of the Heritage Council of the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) and is also a member of the Commercial Development and Marketing Association (CDMA) and the Société de Chimie Industrielle. He has authored articles in such diverse journals as Business Economics, Chemistry Business, Chimica Oggi, Cost Engineering, and Hydrocarbon Processing and writes a monthly economics column in Chemical Engineering Progress. Dr. Swift has been featured on National Public Radio and has appeared on Bloomberg TV and Nightly Business Report.
Dr. Swift is a graduate of Ashland University with a BA degree and a graduate of Case Western Reserve University with a MA degree in Economics. He is also a graduate of Anglia Polytechnic University with a DBA (doctorate in business administration) degree and has completed the Tax Analysis and Revenue Forecasting Program and other studies at Harvard University as well as studies at the University of Oxford. Dr. Swift is an adjunct instructor of business economics at the University of Mary Washington.
Diane C. Swonk
Mesirow Financial
Diane Swonk is a senior managing director and chief economist for Mesirow Financial, a diversified financial services firm based in Chicago. As one of the most sought-after economists in the world, she is frequently called upon by policymakers and business leaders from Washington to Tokyo. Diane joined Mesirow Financial in 2004 after 19 years with Bank One Corporation and its predecessors. She started her career with the First Chicago Corporation in 1985 and quickly moved up the ranks, proving herself as a regional economist with her forecast for a renaissance in the Industrial Midwest just one year later. During her tenure with First Chicago, Diane published several nationally acclaimed studies as well as her first book, The Passionate Economist: Finding the Power and Humanity Behind the Numbers.
Diane sits on several advisory committees to the Federal Reserve Board, its regional banks and the Council of Economic Advisers for the White House. Most recently, she was re-appointed to serve on the Congressional Budget Office's panel of economic advisers. As one of the most quoted economists in the financial press, Diane is seen regularly on national and international television, and her commentary can be read in top financial news publications throughout the world. In addition, she serves as a clinical professor for DePaul University's highly-rated evening MBA program.
Diane currently serves on the Chicago Conservation Center's Advisory Board, is on the sitting committee for the University of Chicago—Graduate School of Business, and is an advisor to the Economic Department for the University of Michigan. She is also involved extensively with the Economic and Executives' Clubs of Chicago. Diane has also served on the Joffrey Ballet Board and chaired the City of Chicago's Climate Change Finance Committee.
Diane is past president of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), a title that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and several other Federal Reserve presidents have also shared. Diane was the youngest to serve as president in the association's history and continues to dedicate much of her time to improving the quality and timeliness of economic data, a critical aspect of policymaking.
Diane has earned many awards throughout her career. She was designated "Business Leader of the Year" by the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, named a "Fellow" of NABE for her outstanding contributions to the field of business economics and listed as one of the "top forecasters in the country" by the Wall Street Journal. In addition, Today's Chicago Woman named her "Top Woman in Finance in Chicago" and the Chicago Sun-Times crowned her "one of the most influential women in business in Chicago."
Diane earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in economics with top honors from the University of Michigan as well as a master's degree in finance and strategic planning with top honors from the University of Chicago.
John Tarnoff
DreamWorks Animation
John has been in the motion picture business for 25 years as a producer and studio executive, supervising films such as Diner, Pink Floyd: The Wall, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and The Power of One during the 80s and early 90s. He branched into multimedia, writing and producing CD-ROM games in the early 90s, including War Games, based on the MGM movie, and Big Brother, based on George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984.
Prior to joining DreamWorks, from 1996 until 2002, John was the co-founder and C.E.O. of Talkie, Inc an internet technology company that pioneered online conversational animated characters for marketing, brand building, lead generation, customer service and training. To develop its products, the company created proprietary artificial intelligence and behavioral animation software. Clients included Sprint, Intel Corporation, Progressive Insurance and Scottrade. John holds a B.A. from Amherst College in Massachusetts and a M.A. in Applied Psychology from the University of Santa Monica. He was raised in New York and Paris and is a published still photographer.
Chris Varvares
Macroeconomic Advisers
Chris Varvares is President of Macroeconomic Advisers, a company he co-founded with Joel Prakken and Laurence Meyer as Laurence H. Meyer & Associates in 1982. The firm became Macroeconomic Advisers in June of 1996 when Dr. Meyer left the firm to join the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Dr. Meyer returned to the firm in the summer of 2002 following his term at the Fed.
Mr. Varvares has over 25 years of experience in macroeconomic forecasting and policy analysis, both as a principal of Macroeconomic Advisers (1982 to present) and as a member of the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (1981-1982). While at the Council, he served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the OECD in April 1982. Mr. Varvares is the Vice President (9/2007-9/2008) and a former director of the National Association for Business Economics, served as President of the St. Louis chapter, and is a member of the American Economic Association. He serves as a member of Time Magazine’s Board of Economists, is a member of the New York State Economic and Revenue Advisory Board, and has been a panelist for the World Economic Forum.
He and the other principals of Macroeconomic Advisers serve as consultants to key agencies of the U.S., Canadian, Japanese, and U.K. governments, major trade associations, and private corporations and are widely quoted in the business and financial media. The firm is recognized as among the most accurate forecasters of the U.S. economy. A 2006 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that Macroeconomic Advisers had the best forecasting track record of any forecaster in the Blue Chip Economic Indicators panel over the 19 years included in the study. The firm also won the 2006 Annual Forecasting Award of the National Association of Business Economics and twice has won the Annual Forecasting Award for the highest forecast accuracy among participants in the Blue Chip Economic Indicators, and would have been the only three-time winner of the award if not for a rule that precluded winning in two consecutive years. Macroeconomic Advisers is also a prominent participant in the debates over the macroeconomic effects of federal budget and tax policy, and monetary policy.
Mr. Varvares holds a B.A. in Economics from The George Washington University and received his graduate training in economics from Washington University in St. Louis.
David Wessel
The Wall Street Journal
David Wessel, 53, is economics editor of The Wall Street Journal and writes the "Capital” column, a weekly look at the economy and forces shaping living standards around the world. He also appears frequently on CNBC and National Public Radio. David joined The Wall Street Journal in 1984 in Boston, and moved to Washington in 1987, where he was deputy bureau chief until assuming his current job in September 2007. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief. He previously worked for the Boston Globe, the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Middletown (Conn.) Press. A 1975 graduate of Haverford College, he was Knight Bagehot Fellow in Business & Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81. David has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Boston Globe stories in 1983 on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other for stories in The Wall Street Journal in 2002 on corporate wrong-doing. He is the co-author, with Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis, of Prosperity, a 1998 book that argues that the next 20 years will be better for the American middle class than the previous 20.
He and his wife, Naomi Karp, senior policy advisor at AARP’s Public Policy Institute, have two children, Julia, a senior at Kenyon College, and Ben, a freshman at Middlebury College. David is a trustee of Temple Sinai in Washington, D.C., and has served as a member of the Committee for Economic Development’s Research Advisory Board and the advisory board of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.
Judy Woodruff
The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff has covered politics and other news for more than three decades at CNN, NBC and PBS. Most recently, she signed on as a senior correspondent and political editor for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
In early 2007, Woodruff concluded initial reporting and production, along with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, on Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard. Generation Next is a project that interviewed American young people and reported on their views, and included an hour-long documentary aired on many PBS stations in January, 2007, a series of reports on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, reports on NPR and in USA Today, and partnerships with Yahoo! and Film Your Issue. A second hour-long Generation Next documentary aired on PBS stations on September 5, 2007.
For 12 years, Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, anchoring the weekday political program, Inside Politics. At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and from 1984-1990, she anchored PBS' award-winning weekly documentary series, Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
At NBC News, Woodruff served as White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982. For one year after that she served as NBC's Today Show Chief Washington correspondent.
Kay Wortman
Kay Wortman, Inc.
Kay Wortman has 19+ years experience in sales and marketing with companies that include Clairol, Revlon and Chesebrough Ponds. She has been in sales and sales management responsible for managing and training national sales organizations. Kay has appeared on local television stations and a featured guest and co-host of Between Friends on KMOX radio.
Kay started her company, Kay Wortman, Inc. focusing on image. From there KWI grew to motivation and training in the areas of non-verbal communication, business/social etiquette and building relationships. The seminars are 1 to 3 hours in length and can be tailored to any company or organization.
