Speaker Biographies

Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at AEI whose research focuses on global currencies, major emerging market economies, and the role of the multilateral lending institutions. He writes extensively on topics such as economic policy, fund arrangements, monetary reform, import restrictions, and exchange rates. Before joining AEI, he was a managing director and chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. Previously, he was deputy director in the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund.

Alex J. Pollock has been a resident fellow at AEI since July 2004, focusing on financial policy issues, including government-sponsored enterprises, Social Security reform, accounting standards, and the issues raised by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Previously he spent thirty-five years in banking, including twelve years as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, while also writing numerous articles on financial systems and management. He is a director of Allied Capital Corporation, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation, the International Union for Housing Finance, and chairman of the board at the Great Books Foundation.

Nouriel Roubini is a professor of economics at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, and cofounder and chairman of Roubini Global Economics LLC, a Web-based economic and geostrategic information service and economic consultancy. Before joining Stern, he was a faculty member of the Economics Department at Yale University from 1988 to 1995. From 1998 to 1999, Mr. Roubini served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and from 1999 to 2000 was senior advisor to the under secretary for international affairs and director of the Office of Policy Development and Review at the U.S. Treasury Department. He has been a regular visitor and consultant to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other public and private institutions. In addition, Mr. Roubini has published over seventy theoretical and empirical policy papers on international macroeconomic issues, the European and U.S. economies, the Asian and global financial crises, emerging markets, the reform of the international financial system, and global economic imbalances. He is coauthor with Alberto Alesina of Political Cycles: Theory and Evidence (MIT Press, 1997) and coauthor with Brad Setser of Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets (Institute for International Economics, 2004). Roubini is a frequent commentator on global economic issues, and his global economics website was ranked the #1 website in economics in the world by The Economist in 1999.

R. Christopher Whalen is senior vice president and a managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, with responsibility for sales, marketing, and business development. He is a general securities principal and has worked as an investment banker, research analyst, and journalist for more than two decades. In 1981, Mr. Whalen worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and then as a management trainee at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked in the bank supervision and foreign exchange departments. He subsequently worked in the fixed income department of Bear, Stearns & Co. in London. After returning to the United States in 1988, he spent a decade providing risk management and loan workout services to multinational companies and government agencies operating in Latin America. Mr. Whalen provided due-diligence and credit workout services to a number of multinational clients operating in Mexico, including the Export-Import Bank of the United States and Kroll Associates and Weyerhaeuser, and served as an adviser to the presidential campaign of Cuauhtémoc Cardenas Solórzano. In 1997, he returned to Wall Street, working as an investment banker in the mergers and acquisitions group of Bear, Stearns & Co. and later Prudential Securities, where he focused on the technology sector. He then served as the managing director of the Free Internet Group Ltd., one of the largest independent Internet service providers in the United Kingdom. In 2001, Mr. Whalen returned to investment banking, working as a banker at Fechtor, Detwiler & Co. and an equity research analyst at Ramberg, Whalen & Co., following companies such as IBM, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco Systems. In addition to editing the newsletter The Institutional Risk Analyst, he contributes regularly to publications such as Barron's, The International Economy, and the Washington Times. He has appeared before the U.S. Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission to testify on a variety of financial issues, and speaks on topics such as XBRL, investing, and corporate governance.

Thomas Zimmerman is a managing director in the securitized products strategy group at UBS Investment Bank, where he manages the firm’s asset-backed security (ABS) and mortgage credit research. Prior to joining UBS, Mr. Zimmerman spent eight years at Prudential Securities, first as a senior vice president in the mortgage research group and later as head of the ABS research department. Before that, he managed the MBS (mortgage-backed security)/ABS research group at Chemical Bank. He started his research career as a vice president in the mortgage research department at Salomon Brothers. His research has appeared in numerous fixed-income publications and industry reference works, including the Handbook of Fixed Income Securities (McGraw-Hill, 2001) and the Handbook of Mortgage-Backed Securities (McGraw-Hill, 2001). He is a member of the UBS research team that ranked first in the latest Institutional Investor survey of fixed-income analysts.

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