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.
Senior Advisor, US Policy Metrics and Former U.S. Senator, Texas
Senator Gramm is a Senior Advisor at US Policy Metrics, overseeing our policy advisory team and acting as our Ambassador in Washington DC. Before US Policy Metrics, Senator Gramm was the Vice-Chairman of UBS Investment Bank for 9 years. At UBS he focused on providing strategic economic, political and policy advice to major corporate and institutional clients all around the world. He provided senior leadership on such landmark IPOs as Visa, Bank of China, China Merchants Bank and LGPhillips in Korea. He was instrumental in the follow-on equity offering for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the privatization of Telstra in Australia.
Senator Gramm served six years in the US House and eighteen years in the US Senate. His legislative record includes landmark bills like the Gramm-Latta Budget, which reduced federal spending, rebuilt national defense and mandated the Reagan tax cut and the Gramm-Rudman Act, which placed the first binding constraints on federal spending. As Chairman of the Banking Committee, Senator Gramm steered through legislation modernizing banking, insurance and securities law, which had been languishing in Congress for 60 years. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed banks, securities firms and insurance companies to affiliate as part of a financial services holding company. Dodd-Frank did not change Gramm-Leach-Bliley but expanded it by requiring systemically significant non-banks to become financial services holding companies.
Phil Gramm holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in economics, the subject he taught at Texas A&M University for 12 years. He has published numerous articles and books on subjects ranging from monetary theory and policy to private property and the economics of mineral extraction.
He is married to Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm, former Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Presidents Reagan and Bush. They have two sons, Marshall and Jeff and four grandchildren, Caroline, Will, Joshua and Gilbert.
Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, Gates Corporation
Matthew R. A. Heiman joined the Company in May 2026 and has served as the Company’s Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary since June 2026. As Chief Legal Officer, Mr. Heiman is responsible for all legal functions for Gates, including securities and corporate governance, M&A, litigation, commercial, regulatory, compliance, patents and trademarks, real estate, employment and labor, sustainability and environmental matters. Prior to joining Gates, Mr. Heiman held senior legal leadership roles at Waystar, where he served as Chief Legal & Administrative Officer from 2023 to 2025 and as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary from 2020 to 2023. Prior to that, he was with Johnson Controls, where he served as Vice President, Corporate Secretary, and Associate General Counsel. Mr. Heiman has been a Senior Fellow for the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law since 2018.
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.
Associate Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
Associate Professor of Law J.W. Verret joined the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University faculty in 2008. In 2013, he took leave for two years to serve as the Chief Economist and Senior Counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. He received his JD and MA in Public Policy from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, respectively, in 2006. While in law school, Professor Verret served an Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics at the Harvard Program on Corporate Governance under the guidance of Prof. Lucian Bebchuk.
Professor Verret then served as a law clerk for Vice-Chancellor John W. Noble of the Delaware Court of Chancery. Prior to joining the faculty at Scalia Law, Professor Verret was an associate in the SEC Enforcement Defense Practice Group at Skadden, Arps in Washington, D.C. He has written extensively on corporate law topics, including Delaware's Guidance, co-written with Chief Justice Myron T. Steele of the Delaware Supreme Court. His academic work has been featured in the Yale Journal on Regulation, The Business Lawyer, the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, and the Virginia Law and Business Review. Professor Verret was selected by the Northwestern Law School Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth for a 2009-2010 Searle-Kaufmann Research Fellowship.
Professor Verret is also a Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center Working Group on Financial Markets, where he regularly briefs Congressional staff, members of Congress, SEC Commissioners and other financial regulatory agencies on financial regulation topics. He also directs the Corporate Federalism Initiative, where he obtains research grants for a network of students and faculty scholars who study the division between states and the federal government as sources of corporate law. Professor Verret has been invited to testify before various House and Senate Committees four times during the financial crisis of 2009 regarding all of the central provisions of the Obama Administration's 2009 financial regulatory reform proposals. For a full list of Professor Verret's C-Span appearances, including testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, see http://www.c-spanvideo.org/jwverret.
Professor Verret has been an invited panelist for various television appearances, including an interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Professor Verret has been quoted in various media on financial regulation and corporate law topics, including the New York Times, CNN Money, the CNN Political Ticker, CNBC, ABC News, Investor's Business Daily, ESPN.com, The American Banker, The American Lawyer, The Huffington Post, CBS.com, and AP News. Professor Verret's op-eds have been featured in Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The Orange County Register, and The Wall Street Journal. Professor Verret is also a regular guest contributor to three of the most noted corporate law and financial regulation law blogs: the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation Forum, Deallawyers.com, and The Conglomerate.
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.
Senior Advisor, US Policy Metrics and Former U.S. Senator, Texas
Senator Gramm is a Senior Advisor at US Policy Metrics, overseeing our policy advisory team and acting as our Ambassador in Washington DC. Before US Policy Metrics, Senator Gramm was the Vice-Chairman of UBS Investment Bank for 9 years. At UBS he focused on providing strategic economic, political and policy advice to major corporate and institutional clients all around the world. He provided senior leadership on such landmark IPOs as Visa, Bank of China, China Merchants Bank and LGPhillips in Korea. He was instrumental in the follow-on equity offering for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the privatization of Telstra in Australia.
Senator Gramm served six years in the US House and eighteen years in the US Senate. His legislative record includes landmark bills like the Gramm-Latta Budget, which reduced federal spending, rebuilt national defense and mandated the Reagan tax cut and the Gramm-Rudman Act, which placed the first binding constraints on federal spending. As Chairman of the Banking Committee, Senator Gramm steered through legislation modernizing banking, insurance and securities law, which had been languishing in Congress for 60 years. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed banks, securities firms and insurance companies to affiliate as part of a financial services holding company. Dodd-Frank did not change Gramm-Leach-Bliley but expanded it by requiring systemically significant non-banks to become financial services holding companies.
Phil Gramm holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in economics, the subject he taught at Texas A&M University for 12 years. He has published numerous articles and books on subjects ranging from monetary theory and policy to private property and the economics of mineral extraction.
He is married to Dr. Wendy Lee Gramm, former Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Presidents Reagan and Bush. They have two sons, Marshall and Jeff and four grandchildren, Caroline, Will, Joshua and Gilbert.
Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, Gates Corporation
Matthew R. A. Heiman joined the Company in May 2026 and has served as the Company’s Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary since June 2026. As Chief Legal Officer, Mr. Heiman is responsible for all legal functions for Gates, including securities and corporate governance, M&A, litigation, commercial, regulatory, compliance, patents and trademarks, real estate, employment and labor, sustainability and environmental matters. Prior to joining Gates, Mr. Heiman held senior legal leadership roles at Waystar, where he served as Chief Legal & Administrative Officer from 2023 to 2025 and as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary from 2020 to 2023. Prior to that, he was with Johnson Controls, where he served as Vice President, Corporate Secretary, and Associate General Counsel. Mr. Heiman has been a Senior Fellow for the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law since 2018.
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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