Speaker biographies

Richard Berner is a managing director, cohead of global economics, and chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley. He codirects the firm’s forecasting and analysis of the global economy and financial markets and coheads the firm’s strategy forum. Before joining Morgan Stanley in 1999, Mr. Berner was executive vice president and chief economist at Mellon Bank and a member of Mellon’s senior management committee. He also served for seven years on the research staff of the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office and a member of the executive committee and a director at large of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the 2007 winner of the William F. Butler Award for excellence in business economics.

Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at AEI whose research focuses on global currencies, major emerging market economies, and the role of the multilateral lending institutions. He writes extensively on topics such as economic policy, fund arrangements, monetary reform, import restrictions, and exchange rates. Before joining AEI, he was a managing director and chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. Previously, he was deputy director in the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund.

Allan H. Meltzer is a visiting scholar at AEI and the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University. He served as the honorary adviser to the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies of the Bank of Japan from 1986 to 2002. He was a member of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board during the Reagan administration. He has been an acting member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to the U.S. Treasury and to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In 1999 and 2000, he served as the chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, which was appointed by Congress to review the role of these institutions. The author of several books and numerous papers on economic theory and policy, he is also a founder of the Shadow Open Market Committee. In 2002, he was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. He received the first annual Irving Kristol Award and delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI’s annual dinner in February 2003.

Michael Prell is an independent economic consultant to financial firms. He has been an adviser to the Deutsche Bank economics group since 2001. He began his career at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He moved to the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., in 1973 and has held various positions in the board’s Division of Research and Statistics, serving as director from 1987 until his retirement in 2000. During his tenure as director, Mr. Prell also served as economist to the Federal Open Market Committee and bore the primary responsibility for the preparation and presentation of the staff’s domestic economic and financial forecasts.

Vincent R. Reinhart, a resident scholar at AEI, is a former director of the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Monetary Affairs who has spent more than two decades working on domestic and international aspects of U.S. monetary policy. He held a number of senior positions in the Divisions of Monetary Affairs and International Finance and spent the last six years of his Federal Reserve career as secretary and economist of the Federal Open Market Committee. Mr. Reinhart has worked on topics as varied as economic bubbles and the conduct of monetary policy, auctions of U.S. Treasury securities, alternative strategies for monetary policy, and the efficient communication of monetary policy decisions.

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