Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics, Senior Fellow – Economic Studies, Brookings Institution
Donald Kohn holds the Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics and is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Kohn is a 40-year veteran of the Federal Reserve system, serving as member and then vice chair of the Board of Governors from 2002-2010. He also served as an external member of the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England from 2011-2021. Kohn is an expert on monetary policy, financial regulation, and macroeconomics and has written extensively on these issues. Prior to taking office as a member of the Board of Governors he served in a number of staff roles at the Board, including secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee (1987-2002) and director of the Division of Monetary Affairs (1987-2001). He has also served as chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), a central bank panel that monitors and examines broad issues related to financial markets and systems. He advised Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke throughout the 2008-2009 financial crisis and served as a key adviser to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Money Marketeers of New York University (2002), lifetime achievement awards from The Clearing House (2012) and Central Banking magazine (2017), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Wooster (1998), and the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, from the College of Wooster (2006). In 2016, he was made honorary Commander of the British Empire. Kohn was born in November 1942 in Philadelphia. He received a B.A. in economics in 1964 from the College of Wooster and a Ph.D. in economics in 1971 from the University of Michigan. He is married and has two adult children and four grandchildren.
In addition to his Brookings position, Kohn serves on the board of Forbright Bank, consults on monetary policy for T. Rowe Price, chairs the Academic Advisory Committee at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and gives speeches to financial companies on the US economy and monetary policy under the aegis of the Washington Speakers Bureau.
U.S. House of Representatives, Oklahoma
Congressman Frank Lucas is a fifth generation Oklahoman whose family has lived and farmed in Oklahoma for over 120 years. Born on January 6, 1960 in Cheyenne, Oklahoma, Lucas graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1982 with a degree in Agricultural Economics. He was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in a special election in 1994.
Lucas proudly represents Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District, which includes all or portions of 32 counties in northern and western Oklahoma, stretching from the Oklahoma Panhandle to parts of Tulsa, and from Mustang to Altus in the southwest. It takes up almost half the state’s land mass and is one of the largest agricultural regions in the nation. Lucas has been a crusader for the American farmer since being elected to Congress in 1994 and he has fought to protect Oklahoma values.
Prior to his service in Congress, Lucas served for five and a half years in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives, where he fought to defend the rights of private property owners and focused on promoting agriculture issues.
Frank and his wife Lynda have three children and five grandchildren. The Lucas family belongs to the First Baptist Church in Cheyenne.
Partner, Mayer Brown
Andrew Olmem is a partner in Mayer Brown’s Washington DC office and a member of its Public Policy, Regulatory & Government Affairs, and Financial Services Regulatory & Enforcement practices. His practice focuses on complex financial services regulatory and public policy matters.
Andrew previously served as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council (NEC), where he oversaw the development and coordination of the administrations’ domestic economic policies, including for financial services, technology, telecom, energy, and infrastructure.
Earlier, he also served as the Republican Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director at the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Andrew began his legal career practicing corporate and securities law at Mayer Brown in New York City. Prior to attending law school, he served as an Assistant Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics; Co-Director, Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Christina Parajon Skinner is an expert on financial regulation. Her research focuses on central banking, the debt markets, separation of powers, corporate governance, and law and macroeconomics. Professor Skinner’s work is international and comparative in scope, drawing on her experience as an academic and central bank lawyer in the United Kingdom. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal, among other leading academic journals. Professor Skinner has also contributed to financial regulatory policy working groups, including those convened by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Financial Stability Board, and the U.K. Banking Standards Board.
Prior to joining the faculty at Wharton, Professor Skinner served as legal counsel at the Bank of England, in the Financial Stability Division of the Bank’s Legal Directorate. Her work there focused principally on matters of bank resolution, financial market infrastructure, and macroprudential policy. Previously, Professor Skinner was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, Law Department. From 2014-2016, she was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School.
Professor Skinner received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an A.B. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, with a concentration in international economics. She received certificates of proficiency in European Politics and Society, and Spanish Language and Culture.
She is married with five children.
Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics, Senior Fellow – Economic Studies, Brookings Institution
Donald Kohn holds the Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics and is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Kohn is a 40-year veteran of the Federal Reserve system, serving as member and then vice chair of the Board of Governors from 2002-2010. He also served as an external member of the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England from 2011-2021. Kohn is an expert on monetary policy, financial regulation, and macroeconomics and has written extensively on these issues. Prior to taking office as a member of the Board of Governors he served in a number of staff roles at the Board, including secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee (1987-2002) and director of the Division of Monetary Affairs (1987-2001). He has also served as chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), a central bank panel that monitors and examines broad issues related to financial markets and systems. He advised Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke throughout the 2008-2009 financial crisis and served as a key adviser to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Money Marketeers of New York University (2002), lifetime achievement awards from The Clearing House (2012) and Central Banking magazine (2017), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Wooster (1998), and the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, from the College of Wooster (2006). In 2016, he was made honorary Commander of the British Empire. Kohn was born in November 1942 in Philadelphia. He received a B.A. in economics in 1964 from the College of Wooster and a Ph.D. in economics in 1971 from the University of Michigan. He is married and has two adult children and four grandchildren.
In addition to his Brookings position, Kohn serves on the board of Forbright Bank, consults on monetary policy for T. Rowe Price, chairs the Academic Advisory Committee at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and gives speeches to financial companies on the US economy and monetary policy under the aegis of the Washington Speakers Bureau.
U.S. House of Representatives, Oklahoma
Congressman Frank Lucas is a fifth generation Oklahoman whose family has lived and farmed in Oklahoma for over 120 years. Born on January 6, 1960 in Cheyenne, Oklahoma, Lucas graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1982 with a degree in Agricultural Economics. He was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in a special election in 1994.
Lucas proudly represents Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District, which includes all or portions of 32 counties in northern and western Oklahoma, stretching from the Oklahoma Panhandle to parts of Tulsa, and from Mustang to Altus in the southwest. It takes up almost half the state’s land mass and is one of the largest agricultural regions in the nation. Lucas has been a crusader for the American farmer since being elected to Congress in 1994 and he has fought to protect Oklahoma values.
Prior to his service in Congress, Lucas served for five and a half years in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives, where he fought to defend the rights of private property owners and focused on promoting agriculture issues.
Frank and his wife Lynda have three children and five grandchildren. The Lucas family belongs to the First Baptist Church in Cheyenne.
Partner, Mayer Brown
Andrew Olmem is a partner in Mayer Brown’s Washington DC office and a member of its Public Policy, Regulatory & Government Affairs, and Financial Services Regulatory & Enforcement practices. His practice focuses on complex financial services regulatory and public policy matters.
Andrew previously served as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council (NEC), where he oversaw the development and coordination of the administrations’ domestic economic policies, including for financial services, technology, telecom, energy, and infrastructure.
Earlier, he also served as the Republican Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director at the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Andrew began his legal career practicing corporate and securities law at Mayer Brown in New York City. Prior to attending law school, he served as an Assistant Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics; Co-Director, Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Christina Parajon Skinner is an expert on financial regulation. Her research focuses on central banking, the debt markets, separation of powers, corporate governance, and law and macroeconomics. Professor Skinner’s work is international and comparative in scope, drawing on her experience as an academic and central bank lawyer in the United Kingdom. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal, among other leading academic journals. Professor Skinner has also contributed to financial regulatory policy working groups, including those convened by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Financial Stability Board, and the U.K. Banking Standards Board.
Prior to joining the faculty at Wharton, Professor Skinner served as legal counsel at the Bank of England, in the Financial Stability Division of the Bank’s Legal Directorate. Her work there focused principally on matters of bank resolution, financial market infrastructure, and macroprudential policy. Previously, Professor Skinner was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, Law Department. From 2014-2016, she was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School.
Professor Skinner received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an A.B. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, with a concentration in international economics. She received certificates of proficiency in European Politics and Society, and Spanish Language and Culture.
She is married with five children.
Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics; Senior Fellow - Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution
Donald Kohn holds the Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics and is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He also currently serves as an external member of the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England. Kohn is a 40-year veteran of the Federal Reserve system, serving as member and then vice chair of the Board of Governors from 2002-2010. Kohn is an expert on monetary policy, financial regulation, and macroeconomics and has written extensively on these issues. Prior to taking office as a member of the Board of Governors he served in a number of staff roles at the Board, including secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee (1987-2002) and director of the Division of Monetary Affairs (1987-2001). He has also served as chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), a central bank panel that monitors and examines broad issues related to financial markets and systems. He advised Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke throughout the 2008-2009 financial crisis and served as a key adviser to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Money Marketeers of New York University (2002), lifetime achievement awards from The Clearing House (2012) and Central Banking magazine (2017), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Wooster (1998), and the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, from the College of Wooster (2006). In 2016, he was made honorary Commander of the British Empire. Kohn was born in November 1942 in Philadelphia. He received a B.A. in economics in 1964 from the College of Wooster and a Ph.D. in economics in 1971 from the University of Michigan. He is married and has two adult children and four grandchildren.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Judge Paul Matey was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 2019 by President Trump.
Before his judicial service, Judge Matey was a partner at Lowenstein Sandler in New Jersey where he practiced complex commercial litigation and criminal defense. Earlier, Judge Matey was the Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary for University Hospital Newark, an academic medical center and teaching hospital.
He also served as the Deputy Chief Counsel to Governor Chris Christie, and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of New Jersey, where he was awarded the Justice Department’s Director’s Award for Superior Performance. He also practiced at the Washington D.C. firm of Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, and served as a law clerk to judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Scranton, a Jesuit University, in 1993, and his juris doctorate, summa cum laude, from Seton Hall University School of Law in 2001, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Seton Hall Law Review.
In 2019, Judge Matey was elected to membership in the American Law Institute and, since 2020, has lectured on administrative law and the American legal history at Seton Hall.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Senior Fellow, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School
Paul Sheard is Senior Fellow of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, he was Vice Chairman of S&P Global, after serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Economist. Earlier, he held chief economist positions at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, Nomura Securities and Lehman Brothers, and was Head of Japan Equity Investments at Baring Asset Management. Sheard was on the faculty of the Australian National University (ANU) and of Osaka University, and was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University and foreign visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan.
Sheard is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Economic Agenda (2018-2020) and was a member of the WEF’s Global Agenda Council on the International Monetary System (2010-2012). He was appointed twice, by Prime Minister Hashimoto and by Prime Minister Obuchi, to serve on committees of the Japanese Government’s Economic Deliberation Council. He is on the board of the Foreign Policy Association and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Economic Club of New York. Sheard served as a non-executive director of ORIX Corporation (2003-2010). He speaks regularly at conferences around the world, and his views on the global economy and policy are frequently cited in the international press.
Author or editor of several books and numerous academic articles, Sheard’s book in Japanese, Mein Banku Shihon Shugi no Kiki (The Crisis of Main Bank Capitalism), won the Suntory-Gakugei Prize in the Economics–Politics Division. Sheard received a BA (Hons) from Monash University and a Master of Economics and Ph.D. from the ANU. In 2019, he received a Doctor of Laws honoris causa from Monash University.
Professor Emeritus of Economics, New York University Stern School of Business
Richard Sylla is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, where from 1990 to 2015 he was Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets. Sylla is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Cliometric Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Professor Sylla received the B.A., the M.A., and the Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His research focus is on the financial history of the United States in comparative contexts. He is the author of Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography (2016) and The American Capital Market, 1846-1914 (1975); co-author of Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt (2018), The Evolution of the American Economy (1993; 1st ed., 1980) and A History of Interest Rates, (4th ed., 2005; 3rd ed. Rev., 1996; 3rd ed., 1991); and co-editor of Patterns of European Industrialization—The Nineteenth Century (1991), The State, the Financial System, and Economic Modernization (1999); Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s (2011); and Genealogy of American Finance (2015), as well as articles, essays, and reviews in business, economic, and financial history.
Sylla is a former editor of The Journal of Economic History. During 1998-2000, Sylla served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Cliometric Society, an association of quantitative economic historians. In 2000-2001, he was president of the Economic History Association, the professional organization of economic historians in the United States. In 2005-2006, he served as president of the Business History Conference (BHC), the leading professional association of business historians; BHC presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to him in 2011. Currently, Sylla serves as chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of American Finance, a Smithsonian affiliate museum located at 48 Wall Street in New York.
Wayne A. Abernathy, Wild Bells
Wayne A. Abernathy is a former U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions under President George W. Bush, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of his service. In that office he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Prior to his work at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy served as Staff Director of the Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Phil Gramm.
Following his service at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy worked for 15 years on the staff of the American Bankers Association, as Executive Vice President for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs.
Previous experience with the Senate Banking Committee includes serving as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Securities during 1995-1998. From 1989 until 1994, Mr. Abernathy was a Republican economist for the committee. He previously worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Gramm during 1987-1989 and as an economist for the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy during 1981-1986, under Chairman Jake Garn.
Mr. Abernathy earned his bachelor’s degree in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in International Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.
Wayne A. Abernathy, Wild Bells
Wayne A. Abernathy is a former U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions under President George W. Bush, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of his service. In that office he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Prior to his work at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy served as Staff Director of the Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Phil Gramm.
Following his service at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy worked for 15 years on the staff of the American Bankers Association, as Executive Vice President for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs.
Previous experience with the Senate Banking Committee includes serving as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Securities during 1995-1998. From 1989 until 1994, Mr. Abernathy was a Republican economist for the committee. He previously worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Gramm during 1987-1989 and as an economist for the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy during 1981-1986, under Chairman Jake Garn.
Mr. Abernathy earned his bachelor’s degree in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in International Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.
Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics; Senior Fellow - Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution
Donald Kohn holds the Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics and is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He also currently serves as an external member of the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England. Kohn is a 40-year veteran of the Federal Reserve system, serving as member and then vice chair of the Board of Governors from 2002-2010. Kohn is an expert on monetary policy, financial regulation, and macroeconomics and has written extensively on these issues. Prior to taking office as a member of the Board of Governors he served in a number of staff roles at the Board, including secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee (1987-2002) and director of the Division of Monetary Affairs (1987-2001). He has also served as chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), a central bank panel that monitors and examines broad issues related to financial markets and systems. He advised Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke throughout the 2008-2009 financial crisis and served as a key adviser to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Money Marketeers of New York University (2002), lifetime achievement awards from The Clearing House (2012) and Central Banking magazine (2017), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Wooster (1998), and the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, from the College of Wooster (2006). In 2016, he was made honorary Commander of the British Empire. Kohn was born in November 1942 in Philadelphia. He received a B.A. in economics in 1964 from the College of Wooster and a Ph.D. in economics in 1971 from the University of Michigan. He is married and has two adult children and four grandchildren.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Judge Paul Matey was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 2019 by President Trump.
Before his judicial service, Judge Matey was a partner at Lowenstein Sandler in New Jersey where he practiced complex commercial litigation and criminal defense. Earlier, Judge Matey was the Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary for University Hospital Newark, an academic medical center and teaching hospital.
He also served as the Deputy Chief Counsel to Governor Chris Christie, and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of New Jersey, where he was awarded the Justice Department’s Director’s Award for Superior Performance. He also practiced at the Washington D.C. firm of Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, and served as a law clerk to judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Scranton, a Jesuit University, in 1993, and his juris doctorate, summa cum laude, from Seton Hall University School of Law in 2001, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Seton Hall Law Review.
In 2019, Judge Matey was elected to membership in the American Law Institute and, since 2020, has lectured on administrative law and the American legal history at Seton Hall.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Senior Fellow, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School
Paul Sheard is Senior Fellow of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, he was Vice Chairman of S&P Global, after serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Economist. Earlier, he held chief economist positions at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, Nomura Securities and Lehman Brothers, and was Head of Japan Equity Investments at Baring Asset Management. Sheard was on the faculty of the Australian National University (ANU) and of Osaka University, and was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University and foreign visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan.
Sheard is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Economic Agenda (2018-2020) and was a member of the WEF’s Global Agenda Council on the International Monetary System (2010-2012). He was appointed twice, by Prime Minister Hashimoto and by Prime Minister Obuchi, to serve on committees of the Japanese Government’s Economic Deliberation Council. He is on the board of the Foreign Policy Association and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Economic Club of New York. Sheard served as a non-executive director of ORIX Corporation (2003-2010). He speaks regularly at conferences around the world, and his views on the global economy and policy are frequently cited in the international press.
Author or editor of several books and numerous academic articles, Sheard’s book in Japanese, Mein Banku Shihon Shugi no Kiki (The Crisis of Main Bank Capitalism), won the Suntory-Gakugei Prize in the Economics–Politics Division. Sheard received a BA (Hons) from Monash University and a Master of Economics and Ph.D. from the ANU. In 2019, he received a Doctor of Laws honoris causa from Monash University.
Professor Emeritus of Economics, New York University Stern School of Business
Richard Sylla is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, where from 1990 to 2015 he was Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets. Sylla is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Cliometric Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Professor Sylla received the B.A., the M.A., and the Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His research focus is on the financial history of the United States in comparative contexts. He is the author of Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography (2016) and The American Capital Market, 1846-1914 (1975); co-author of Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt (2018), The Evolution of the American Economy (1993; 1st ed., 1980) and A History of Interest Rates, (4th ed., 2005; 3rd ed. Rev., 1996; 3rd ed., 1991); and co-editor of Patterns of European Industrialization—The Nineteenth Century (1991), The State, the Financial System, and Economic Modernization (1999); Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s (2011); and Genealogy of American Finance (2015), as well as articles, essays, and reviews in business, economic, and financial history.
Sylla is a former editor of The Journal of Economic History. During 1998-2000, Sylla served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Cliometric Society, an association of quantitative economic historians. In 2000-2001, he was president of the Economic History Association, the professional organization of economic historians in the United States. In 2005-2006, he served as president of the Business History Conference (BHC), the leading professional association of business historians; BHC presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to him in 2011. Currently, Sylla serves as chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of American Finance, a Smithsonian affiliate museum located at 48 Wall Street in New York.
Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics, Senior Fellow – Economic Studies, Brookings Institution
Donald Kohn holds the Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics and is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Kohn is a 40-year veteran of the Federal Reserve system, serving as member and then vice chair of the Board of Governors from 2002-2010. He also served as an external member of the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England from 2011-2021. Kohn is an expert on monetary policy, financial regulation, and macroeconomics and has written extensively on these issues. Prior to taking office as a member of the Board of Governors he served in a number of staff roles at the Board, including secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee (1987-2002) and director of the Division of Monetary Affairs (1987-2001). He has also served as chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), a central bank panel that monitors and examines broad issues related to financial markets and systems. He advised Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke throughout the 2008-2009 financial crisis and served as a key adviser to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Money Marketeers of New York University (2002), lifetime achievement awards from The Clearing House (2012) and Central Banking magazine (2017), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Wooster (1998), and the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, from the College of Wooster (2006). In 2016, he was made honorary Commander of the British Empire. Kohn was born in November 1942 in Philadelphia. He received a B.A. in economics in 1964 from the College of Wooster and a Ph.D. in economics in 1971 from the University of Michigan. He is married and has two adult children and four grandchildren.
In addition to his Brookings position, Kohn serves on the board of Forbright Bank, consults on monetary policy for T. Rowe Price, chairs the Academic Advisory Committee at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and gives speeches to financial companies on the US economy and monetary policy under the aegis of the Washington Speakers Bureau.
U.S. House of Representatives, Oklahoma
Congressman Frank Lucas is a fifth generation Oklahoman whose family has lived and farmed in Oklahoma for over 120 years. Born on January 6, 1960 in Cheyenne, Oklahoma, Lucas graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1982 with a degree in Agricultural Economics. He was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in a special election in 1994.
Lucas proudly represents Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District, which includes all or portions of 32 counties in northern and western Oklahoma, stretching from the Oklahoma Panhandle to parts of Tulsa, and from Mustang to Altus in the southwest. It takes up almost half the state’s land mass and is one of the largest agricultural regions in the nation. Lucas has been a crusader for the American farmer since being elected to Congress in 1994 and he has fought to protect Oklahoma values.
Prior to his service in Congress, Lucas served for five and a half years in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives, where he fought to defend the rights of private property owners and focused on promoting agriculture issues.
Frank and his wife Lynda have three children and five grandchildren. The Lucas family belongs to the First Baptist Church in Cheyenne.
Partner, Mayer Brown
Andrew Olmem is a partner in Mayer Brown’s Washington DC office and a member of its Public Policy, Regulatory & Government Affairs, and Financial Services Regulatory & Enforcement practices. His practice focuses on complex financial services regulatory and public policy matters.
Andrew previously served as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council (NEC), where he oversaw the development and coordination of the administrations’ domestic economic policies, including for financial services, technology, telecom, energy, and infrastructure.
Earlier, he also served as the Republican Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director at the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Andrew began his legal career practicing corporate and securities law at Mayer Brown in New York City. Prior to attending law school, he served as an Assistant Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics; Co-Director, Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Christina Parajon Skinner is an expert on financial regulation. Her research focuses on central banking, the debt markets, separation of powers, corporate governance, and law and macroeconomics. Professor Skinner’s work is international and comparative in scope, drawing on her experience as an academic and central bank lawyer in the United Kingdom. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal, among other leading academic journals. Professor Skinner has also contributed to financial regulatory policy working groups, including those convened by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Financial Stability Board, and the U.K. Banking Standards Board.
Prior to joining the faculty at Wharton, Professor Skinner served as legal counsel at the Bank of England, in the Financial Stability Division of the Bank’s Legal Directorate. Her work there focused principally on matters of bank resolution, financial market infrastructure, and macroprudential policy. Previously, Professor Skinner was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, Law Department. From 2014-2016, she was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School.
Professor Skinner received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an A.B. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, with a concentration in international economics. She received certificates of proficiency in European Politics and Society, and Spanish Language and Culture.
She is married with five children.
Wayne A. Abernathy, Wild Bells
Wayne A. Abernathy is a former U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions under President George W. Bush, receiving the Alexander Hamilton Award in recognition of his service. In that office he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Prior to his work at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy served as Staff Director of the Senate Banking Committee, under Chairman Phil Gramm.
Following his service at the Treasury, Mr. Abernathy worked for 15 years on the staff of the American Bankers Association, as Executive Vice President for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs.
Previous experience with the Senate Banking Committee includes serving as Staff Director of the Subcommittee on Securities during 1995-1998. From 1989 until 1994, Mr. Abernathy was a Republican economist for the committee. He previously worked as a senior legislative assistant for Senator Gramm during 1987-1989 and as an economist for the Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy during 1981-1986, under Chairman Jake Garn.
Mr. Abernathy earned his bachelor’s degree in International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. In 1980, he received a master’s degree in International Studies from the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.
Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics; Senior Fellow - Economic Studies, The Brookings Institution
Donald Kohn holds the Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics and is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He also currently serves as an external member of the Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England. Kohn is a 40-year veteran of the Federal Reserve system, serving as member and then vice chair of the Board of Governors from 2002-2010. Kohn is an expert on monetary policy, financial regulation, and macroeconomics and has written extensively on these issues. Prior to taking office as a member of the Board of Governors he served in a number of staff roles at the Board, including secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee (1987-2002) and director of the Division of Monetary Affairs (1987-2001). He has also served as chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), a central bank panel that monitors and examines broad issues related to financial markets and systems. He advised Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke throughout the 2008-2009 financial crisis and served as a key adviser to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Money Marketeers of New York University (2002), lifetime achievement awards from The Clearing House (2012) and Central Banking magazine (2017), the Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Wooster (1998), and the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, from the College of Wooster (2006). In 2016, he was made honorary Commander of the British Empire. Kohn was born in November 1942 in Philadelphia. He received a B.A. in economics in 1964 from the College of Wooster and a Ph.D. in economics in 1971 from the University of Michigan. He is married and has two adult children and four grandchildren.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Judge Paul Matey was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 2019 by President Trump.
Before his judicial service, Judge Matey was a partner at Lowenstein Sandler in New Jersey where he practiced complex commercial litigation and criminal defense. Earlier, Judge Matey was the Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary for University Hospital Newark, an academic medical center and teaching hospital.
He also served as the Deputy Chief Counsel to Governor Chris Christie, and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of New Jersey, where he was awarded the Justice Department’s Director’s Award for Superior Performance. He also practiced at the Washington D.C. firm of Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick, and served as a law clerk to judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Scranton, a Jesuit University, in 1993, and his juris doctorate, summa cum laude, from Seton Hall University School of Law in 2001, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Seton Hall Law Review.
In 2019, Judge Matey was elected to membership in the American Law Institute and, since 2020, has lectured on administrative law and the American legal history at Seton Hall.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Senior Fellow, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School
Paul Sheard is Senior Fellow of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, he was Vice Chairman of S&P Global, after serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Economist. Earlier, he held chief economist positions at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, Nomura Securities and Lehman Brothers, and was Head of Japan Equity Investments at Baring Asset Management. Sheard was on the faculty of the Australian National University (ANU) and of Osaka University, and was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University and foreign visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan.
Sheard is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Economic Agenda (2018-2020) and was a member of the WEF’s Global Agenda Council on the International Monetary System (2010-2012). He was appointed twice, by Prime Minister Hashimoto and by Prime Minister Obuchi, to serve on committees of the Japanese Government’s Economic Deliberation Council. He is on the board of the Foreign Policy Association and is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Economic Club of New York. Sheard served as a non-executive director of ORIX Corporation (2003-2010). He speaks regularly at conferences around the world, and his views on the global economy and policy are frequently cited in the international press.
Author or editor of several books and numerous academic articles, Sheard’s book in Japanese, Mein Banku Shihon Shugi no Kiki (The Crisis of Main Bank Capitalism), won the Suntory-Gakugei Prize in the Economics–Politics Division. Sheard received a BA (Hons) from Monash University and a Master of Economics and Ph.D. from the ANU. In 2019, he received a Doctor of Laws honoris causa from Monash University.
Professor Emeritus of Economics, New York University Stern School of Business
Richard Sylla is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, where from 1990 to 2015 he was Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets. Sylla is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Cliometric Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Professor Sylla received the B.A., the M.A., and the Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His research focus is on the financial history of the United States in comparative contexts. He is the author of Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography (2016) and The American Capital Market, 1846-1914 (1975); co-author of Alexander Hamilton on Finance, Credit, and Debt (2018), The Evolution of the American Economy (1993; 1st ed., 1980) and A History of Interest Rates, (4th ed., 2005; 3rd ed. Rev., 1996; 3rd ed., 1991); and co-editor of Patterns of European Industrialization—The Nineteenth Century (1991), The State, the Financial System, and Economic Modernization (1999); Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s (2011); and Genealogy of American Finance (2015), as well as articles, essays, and reviews in business, economic, and financial history.
Sylla is a former editor of The Journal of Economic History. During 1998-2000, Sylla served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Cliometric Society, an association of quantitative economic historians. In 2000-2001, he was president of the Economic History Association, the professional organization of economic historians in the United States. In 2005-2006, he served as president of the Business History Conference (BHC), the leading professional association of business historians; BHC presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to him in 2011. Currently, Sylla serves as chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of American Finance, a Smithsonian affiliate museum located at 48 Wall Street in New York.
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