Speaker biographies

Desmond Lachman joined AEI as a resident fellow after serving as a managing director and chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. He previously served as deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Policy and Review Department and was active in staff formulation of IMF policies toward emerging markets. Mr. Lachman has written on topics such as economic policy, fund arrangements, monetary reform, import restrictions, and exchange rates. At AEI, he studies major emerging market economies and the role of multilateral lending institutions.

Adam Lerrick is a visiting scholar at AEI and the Friends of Allan H. Meltzer Professor of Economics at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. At AEI, Mr. Lerrick studies international capital markets with a focus on hedge funds, international financial crises, sovereign debt restructuring, and economic development. He originated and led the negotiation team of the Argentine Bond Restructuring Agency plc, which united the interests of an estimated 35,000 European retail investors to create the largest foreign creditor in the $100 billion Argentine debt restructuring. Mr. Lerrick served as the adviser on international economic policy to the Joint Economic Committee from 2001 until 2007, as well as to the House majority leader from 2001 to 2003. He also acted as the senior adviser to the chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, known as the “Meltzer Commission.” Formerly head of product development for the international capital markets at Salomon Brothers and then at Credit Suisse First Boston, Mr. Lerrick found solutions to the large-scale financing needs of major governments and multilateral borrowers. In the international capital markets, he designed and executed pioneering debt instruments for many governments, among them, Germany, France, Belgium, and Sweden.

Allan Mendelowitz has been on the board of directors of the Federal Housing Finance Board since 2000, and he served as the board’s chairman from 2000 to 2001. Previously, he was the executive director of the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, a congressionally-appointed, bipartisan panel. Mr. Mendelowitz has also served as the vice president of the Economic Strategy Institute—supervising research on trade policy, international competitiveness, and telecommunications policy—and as an executive vice president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. From 1981 to 1995, Mr. Mendelowitz was the managing director for international trade, finance, and economic competitiveness at the General Accounting Office. He was formerly an economic policy fellow at the Brookings Institution and on the faculty of Rutgers University, where he taught courses in international trade and finance and urban and regional economics. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Business, the National Tax Journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and the Financial Times.

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, and accounting standards. He has written extensively on the housing bubble and bust and is the author of the one-page mortgage disclosure proposal. 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, and the International Union for Housing Finance and chairman of the board of the Great Books Foundation.

Carmen M. Reinhart is a professor of economics at the School of Public Policy and in the department of economics at the University of Maryland. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. She has also served on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and the Journal of International Economics, among others. Ms. Reinhart has held positions as chief economist and vice president at Bear Stearns and, more recently, as deputy director at the research department of the International Monetary Fund. She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade, including banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives, as well as in the financial press, such The Economist, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She is currently working, with Kenneth S. Rogoff, on a book on the history of financial crises entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.