EVENTS

Date:	Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Time:	3:30 PM -- 5:30 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Tim Bitsberger recently formed Bitsberger Consulting. From January 2006 until December 2008, he was the senior vice president and treasurer of funding and investor relations at Freddie Mac. He was responsible for the company's debt and mortgage funding programs, as well as debt and mortgage securities investor relations. Prior to joining Freddie, Mr. Bitsberger was appointed by the president to serve as the assistant secretary for financial markets at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Under his leadership, increased transparency led to improvements in debt management, which resulted in enhanced relationships with all market participants. Mr. Bitsberger previously served as deputy assistant secretary for federal finance at the Treasury for three years, providing policy recommendations on federal financial market issues and assessing the impact of those policies on industries and markets. Prior to the Treasury appointments, Mr. Bitsberger worked on Wall Street for more than fifteen years, most recently as a senior vice president of investments at Salomon Smith Barney.

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

Barry L. Ritholtz is the chief executive officer and director of equity research at Fusion IQ, an online quantitative research firm. He is also the author of “The Big Picture,” a leading financial blog that covers everything from investing and trading to macroeconomics and has been praised by numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Business Week. A frequent commentator on CNBC, Mr. Ritholtz is a regular guest on Kudlow & Company, Power Lunch, and Fast Money, and he has guest-hosted Squawk Box on numerous occasions. He also appears regularly on Bloomberg, Fox, and PBS. His market perspectives are quoted regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Forbes, Fortunes, and other print media. He writes the "Apprenticed Investor" column at TheStreet.com. Mr. Ritholtz is the author of the forthcoming book, Bailout Nation (McGraw Hill, 2009). He has been on the board of directors of Burst.com, a publicly traded software firm, for the past four years, and he teaches a course on the economy of America for New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Previously, Mr. Ritholtz was the chief market strategist for Maxim Group, an investment bank where he managed over 5 billion dollars in clients' assets and wrote weekly market commentary for the firm's brokers and institutional clientele.

Joshua Rosner is a managing director at the independent research consulting firm Graham Fisher & Co., where he advises regulators and institutional investors on housing and mortgage finance issues. Previously, he was the managing director of financial services research for Medley Global Advisors, the premier provider of policy information on monetary, fiscal, regulatory, and political developments to many of the world’s leading banks, mutual funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors. Mr. Rosner was among the first analysts to identify operational and accounting problems in the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), the peak in the housing market, the likelihood of contagion in credit markets, and the weaknesses in the credit rating agencies' collateralized debt obligation (CDO) assumptions. His work on GSEs, credit rating agencies, and mortgage markets has resulted in invitations to present both privately and publicly before numerous organizations, businesses, policymakers, legislators, and regulators. Mr. Rosner has coauthored papers on the risks of CDOs to the mortgage finance market and the risk of misapplication of ratings in the structured finance market. Prior to joining Medley, Mr. Rosner was an executive vice president at CIBC World Markets and a senior vice president at its predecessor firm, Oppenheimer and Company.

Walker F. Todd is a research fellow and conference organizer for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), where he has worked in various capacities since 1995. As an instructor in the AIER summer fellowship program, he teaches a course on the history and origins of competing theories of property rights. Mr. Todd is an attorney admitted to practice in Ohio and New York, an economic consultant with twenty years' experience at the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Cleveland, and has been an instructor in the special studies program at Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, since 1997. A director and program organizer for the Committee for Monetary Research and Education, Mr. Todd was an adjunct faculty member of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law of Cleveland State University for thirteen years. He has authored numerous publications on banking, central banking, and monetary and property rights topics, including those related to international debt, the International Monetary Fund, and the regulation of the banking system and financial markets.

R. Christopher Whalen is the cofounder and managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, where he is responsible for sales, business development, and editorial activities. He has worked as an investment banker, research analyst, and journalist for more than two decades and has covered a variety of industry sectors, including technology and financial institutions. In addition to editing the newsletter The Institutional Risk Analyst, Mr. Whalen contributes regularly to publications such as Barron's, The International Economy, and American Banker. He is a member of Professional Risk Managers International Association, he volunteers as a regional director of the association's Washington, D.C. chapter, and he chairs its speakers committee.