Speaker biographies

Phil Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas, joined UBS Investment Bank as the vice chairman in December of 2002, after serving twenty-four years in Congress, eighteen as a senator. He advises major corporations, governments, and central banks. At UBS, Senator Gramm has been involved in numerous transactions, including Citibank’s 2007 acquisition of Akbank, the initial public offering of China Merchants Bank, and a equity offering for LG.Phillips in Korea. During his time in Congress, Senator Gramm authored many landmark bills, including the 1981 Gramm-Latta Budget, which reduced federal spending, rebuilt national defense, and mandated the President Ronald Reagan’s tax cut. He also passed the Gramm-Rudman Act, which placed the first binding constraints on federal spending. As the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he led the successful effort to restore a Republican majority in the Senate in 1994. As the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Gramm steered through legislation modernizing the banking, insurance, and securities laws, which had been languishing in Congress for sixty years. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the seventy year-old Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited banks, securities firms, and insurance companies from affiliating. Senator Gramm has published numerous articles and books on subjects ranging from monetary theory and policy to private property to the economics of mineral extraction.

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries and the 2008 presidential campaign. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (AEI Press, 2005). He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. Mr. Hassett’s popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

Allan H. Meltzer is a visiting scholar at AEI and the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University. He served as the honorary adviser to the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan from 1986 to 2002. He was a member of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board during the Reagan administration. He has been an acting member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to the U.S. Treasury and to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, which was appointed by Congress to review the role of these institutions. The author of several books and numerous papers on economic theory and policy, he is also a founder of the Shadow Open Market Committee. In 2002, he was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. He received the first annual Irving Kristol Award and delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI’s annual dinner in February 2003.

Adam S. Posen is the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he has been a senior fellow since 1997. His research focuses on macroeconomic policy and performance, European and Japanese political economy, and central banking issues. A widely cited expert on monetary policy, he has been a visiting scholar at central banks worldwide, and in 2006 he was on sabbatical leave as the Houblon-Norman Senior Fellow at the Bank of England. Mr. Posen has also been a consultant to several U.S. government agencies; the European Commission; the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry; the UK Cabinet Office; and the International Monetary Fund. He is a member of the panel of economic advisers to the Congressional Budget Office and of the Council on Foreign Relations, a research associate at the Center for the Japanese Economy and Business at Columbia University, and a fellow of the CESifo Research Network. From 1994 to 1997, Mr. Posen was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Inflation Targeting (Princeton, 1999) and The Japanese Financial Crisis and its Parallels with U.S. Experience (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2000). His forthcoming book is entitled Why Reform a Rich Country: Germany (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2009). He is the cofounder and chair of the editorial board of the refereed journal International Finance. Mr. Posen is a columnist for The International Economy magazine and appears weekly on Bloomberg’s top-rated Money and Politics show.

Eswar S. Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Prasad’s research focuses on labor economics, business cycles, and open economy macroeconomics. Previously, he served as the chief of the financial studies division in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) research department and, before that, was the head of the IMF’s China division. His publications have appeared in numerous collective volumes as well as top academic journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of Monetary Economics. He has contributed op-ed articles to the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal Asia, and various other newspapers. Mr. Prasad has testified before the Senate Finance Committee and the House Committee on Financial Services, and his research has been cited in the U.S. Congressional Record. He was a member of the analytical team that drafted the 2008 report of the High-Level Committee on Financial Sector Reforms set up by the Indian government. Mr. Prasad has served as the coeditor of the IMF Staff Papers journal, was on the editorial board of Finance & Development, and was the founding editor of the quarterly IMF Research Bulletin.

Peter J. Wallison holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies at AEI, where he codirects the Institute’s program on financial market deregulation. He previously practiced banking, corporate, and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and New York. From June 1981 to January 1985, Mr. Wallison was general counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department, where he had a significant role in the development of the Reagan administration’s proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. He also served as general counsel to the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee and participated in the Treasury Department’s efforts to deal with the debt held by less-developed countries. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan. Between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Wallison served first as special assistant to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and, subsequently, as counsel to Mr. Rockefeller when he was vice president of the United States.

View Event Details