September 13, 2004
Speaker Biographies
Jay Brinkmann is vice president of research and economics for the Mortgage Bankers Association. He began his career as a Capitol Hill press secretary, was the deputy chief of staff to the first Republican to be elected governor of Louisiana, was in commercial banking, and was on the business faculty of the University of Houston where he specialized in financial institution regulation and derivatives markets. He spent four years at Fannie Mae working on GSE risk-based capital issues and joined the Mortgage Bankers Association in early 2001. He has published articles on bank regulation and capital requirements in various academic journals and on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, is widely quoted in newspapers and magazines across the country, and appears regularly on cable networks such as CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg.
Jonathan Brown has been the director of the Geographic Information System and Financial Research Project at Essential Information since 1991. The project conducts research and publishes reports on consumer protection regulation in the financial services sector, access to housing and small business credit, community reinvestment performance of banking institutions, and similar concerns. From 1989 to 1991, Mr. Brown was the director of Research on Financial Democracy, a consulting firm to nonprofit organizations on financial regulation issues. From 1985 to 1988, he was the director of BankWatch, a consumer advocacy project of the Center for Study of Responsive Law. Mr. Brown has served on several federal advisory committees, including the GSE Working Group, Department of Housing and Urban Development; Consumer Advisory Council, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; and Advisory Committee on National Banks, Comptroller of the Currency.
Peter J. Wallison joined AEI in 1999 as a resident fellow and as the codirector of AEI's program on financial market deregulation. As a partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, he practiced banking, corporate, and financial law in the firm's Washington and New York offices. As the general counsel of the Treasury Department from 1981 to 1985, Mr. Wallison helped develop the Reagan administration's proposals for deregulating the financial services industry. From 1986 to 1987, Mr. Wallison was counsel to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Back from the Brink, a proposal for a system of private deposit insurance; coauthor of Nationalizing Mortgage Risk: The Growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and The GAAP Gap: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of the Internet; and the editor of Serving Two Masters Yet out of Control: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Optional Federal Chartering of Insurance Companies, all of which have been published by the AEI Press. More recently, Mr. Wallison is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency (Westview Press, 2002).
John C. Weicher is assistant secretary for Housing/Federal Housing Commissioner at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was nominated by President George W. Bush on May 1, 2001. Dr. Weicher has held policy positions at HUD in two previous administrations. He was Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research for Secretary Jack Kemp in the administration of President George Bush, and Chief Economist for Secretary Carla Hills in the administration of President Gerald Ford. He has also served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for Director James C. Miller III in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Congress appointed him to the Millennial Housing Commission in September 2000. He participated in three previous housing commissions, including the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing in 1990-1991, the President's Commission on Housing in 1981, and the National Housing Policy Review in 1973. At Hudson, Dr. Weicher directed the Michigan Urban Policy Initiative, creating a state framework to promote urban homeownership, which was enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support in the legislature and signed by Gov. John Engler in July 1999. He was also a senior participant in Hudson's Wisconsin Welfare Reform Project, working with the state to create Wisconsin's pioneering welfare reform program, Wisconsin Works (W-2), which was enacted in 1996.
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