Speaker biographies

George E. French is deputy director for policy in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) Division of Supervision and Consumer Protection. He oversees the development of supervisory policies with respect to bank safety and soundness, as well as bank regulatory capital. He has served as special adviser to FDIC chairman Donald Powell and acting chairman Martin Gruenberg, and has been extensively involved in the development of the new Basel II capital standards. Mr. French joined the FDIC in 1986 as a financial economist.

Mark J. Tenhundfeld joined the American Bankers Association (ABA) in February 2006 as director of the Office of Regulatory Policy. He came to the ABA from Promontory Interfinancial Network, where he served as general counsel. Prior to Promontory, Mr. Tenhundfeld worked in the legal divisions of the Federal Reserve Board, Comptroller of the Currency, and, most recently, of the Federal Housing Finance Board, where he served as general counsel. He also has represented financial institutions in transactional and compliance matters as a partner in the law firm of Miller, Hamilton, Snider and Odom, LLC.

Peter J. Wallison joined AEI in January 1999 as a resident fellow and as co-director of AEI’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 United States 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.

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.

Gary R. Wilhite is the senior vice president in the Credit Risk Management Group of Wachovia Bank and has been involved with quantitative credit risk management for more than thirteen years with Wachovia and its predecessors. He is responsible for estimating commercial loan default probabilities, loss given default, and usage given default rates; the bank’s allowance for loan losses; economic capital modeling for commercial and consumer credit; and the credit portion of the bank’s Basel efforts. Mr. Wilhite has published articles in RMA Journal and a chapter in the book Economic Capital: A Practitioner Guide (Risk Books, 2004). He has made presentations to the Risk Management Association portfolio management roundtable, the Institute of International Finance, the International Association of Credit Portfolio Managers, Moody’s KMV Portfolio Managers Users Group, the Risk Analysis Division of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and various capital modeling and portfolio management conferences.

View Event Details