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October 4, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Bert Ely is a financial institutions and monetary policy consultant. The principal at Ely & Company, Inc., in Alexandria, Virginia, he has specialized in deposit insurance and banking-structure issues since 1981. In 1986, he was one of the first to publicly predict a taxpayer bailout of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. He monitors conditions in the banking and thrift industries, the politics of the credit-allocation process, and issues concerning monetary policy and the payments system.

Desmond Lachman is a resident scholar 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, Mr. Lachman 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 joined AEI as a resident fellow in July 2004, after serving as president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, a $90 billion housing GSE, since 1991. At the Chicago FHLB, he was the architect of the innovative Mortgage Partnership Finance (MPF) Program, which successfully created direct competition for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on a national basis. Mr. Pollock is a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance and the Bankers Club of Chicago; a director of Allied Capital Corporation, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation, and the Great Books Foundation; and the author of numerous articles on banking, financial systems, and management.

Thomas H. Stanton is a Washington, D.C.-based attorney. His practice relates to the capacity of public institutions to deliver services effectively, with specialties relating to government organization and program design, financial regulation, government corporations, government-sponsored enterprises, and privatization. Mr. Stanton is a former member of the federal senior executive service. He chairs the Standing Panel on Executive Organization and Management at the National Academy of Public Administration and is a fellow of the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches on the law of public institutions. Mr. Stanton’s writings include a book on government-sponsored enterprises, A State of Risk (HarperCollins, 1991), and many articles. Mr. Stanton also has written Government-Sponsored Enterprises: Mercantilist Companies in the Modern World (AEI Press, 2002).

Peter J. Wallison joined AEI in 1999 as a resident fellow and as the codirector of AEI’s program on financial market deregulation. As a partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, he practiced banking, corporate, and financial law in the firm’s Washington and New York offices. As the general counsel of the Treasury Department from 1981 to 1985, Mr. Wallison helped develop the Reagan administration’s proposals for deregulating the financial services industry. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was counsel to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Back from the Brink, a proposal for a system of private deposit insurance; coauthor of Nationalizing Mortgage Risk: The Growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and The GAAP Gap: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of the Internet; and the editor of Serving Two Masters Yet out of Control: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Optional Federal Chartering of Insurance Companies, all of which have been published by the AEI Press. More recently, Mr. Wallison is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency, published in December 2002 by Westview Press.