March 8, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Charles W. Calomiris is the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions in the department of finance and economics and the director of the Program on Financial Institutions at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a visiting scholar and the codirector of the Project on Financial Deregulation at AEI; he is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Calomiris has written many papers and several books on financial institutions, financial economics, and financial history. He has been a consultant on financial regulation for the Federal Reserve Board; the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Chicago, and St. Louis; the World Bank; the Central Bank of Argentina; and the governments of Mexico, El Salvador, China, and Japan.

John J. Castellani is president of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. corporations with a combined workforce of more than 10 million employees in the United States and $3.7 trillion in annual revenues. Mr. Castellani, who became president in May 2001, holds a long history and wealth of experience in industry, corporate management, and public affairs. Previously, he worked with Tenneco, Inc., which he joined in 1992 as senior vice president for government relations. He was named executive vice president in 1997 with responsibility for investor relations, government relations, communications, environment, health and safety, security, and risk management. He joined the Roundtable after leading the corporate and financial practice at the public relations giant, Burson-Marsteller. He is an Ethics Resource Center executive fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of Keep America Beautiful and the Advisory Council of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics.

Charles M. Elson is the Edgar S. Woolard Jr. Chair in Corporate Governance and the director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. He is also "Of Counsel" to the law firm of Holland & Knight. He formerly served as a professor of law at Stetson University College of Law in St. Petersburg, Florida, from 1990 until 2001. His fields of expertise include corporations, securities regulation, and corporate governance. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, the Cornell Law School, and the University of Maryland School of Law, and he is a Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a member of the American Law Institute. Mr. Elson is a frequent contributor on corporate governance issues to various scholarly and popular publications. He is vice chairman of the ABA Business Law Section’s Committee on Corporate Governance and a member of its Committee on Corporate Laws.

Cynthia A. Glassman was appointed by President George W. Bush to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and sworn in on January 28, 2002. Before being appointed Commissioner, Ms. Glassman spent over thirty years in the public and private sectors focusing on financial services regulatory and public policy issues. She spent the first twelve years of her career at the Federal Reserve, first at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and subsequently at the Board of Governors, where her positions included chief of the Financial Reports Section and special assistant to Governor Henry C. Wallich. While at the Board of Governors, Ms. Glassman spent one year on assignment to the U.S. Department of the Treasury as senior economist in the Office of Capital Markets Legislation during the Carter administration. Subsequently, she spent two years at Economists Incorporated, eight years at Furash & Company, where she was the Managing Director for the financial services regulatory and public policy practices, and five years at Ernst & Young, in the Risk Management and Regulatory Practice and the Quantitative Economics and Statistics group.

James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI and the host of TechCentralStation.com. He also writes a syndicated financial column, which appears on the front page of the Washington Post business section every Sunday and is published in other newspapers, including the New York Daily News and the International Herald Tribune. Mr. Glassman is the author of The Secret Code of the Superior Investor (Crown), which Business Week called the best financial book of the 2002 season and Barron’s selected as one of the year’s ten best. His first book, Dow 36,000 (Times Books), a bestseller coauthored with the economist and AEI scholar Kevin A. Hassett, was praised by Newsweek’s Allan Sloan for its "wonderfully clear explanations of financial theory [and] excellent advice on general investing approaches." Mr. Glassman has given frequent congressional testimony, recently on subjects as varied as telecommunications policy, Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, Social Security reform, and personal investing. He is a popular speaker on economic, political, and investing topics.

Kevin A. Hassett is director of economic policy studies and resident scholar at AEI. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was the chief economic adviser to John McCain during the 2000 primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy. He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. His popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets.

Alan G. Hevesi was elected as New York State comptroller in 2002. As chief fiscal officer for the state, he is responsible for governmental and financial oversight and pension fund management. As sole trustee of the 964,000-member state and local retirement system, Mr. Hevesi is responsible for investing a pension fund valued at approximately $100 billion. Previously, he served as New York City’s forty-first comptroller, serving two terms beginning in 1993. During Mr. Hevesi’s tenure, the city’s five pension funds grew from $49 billion to more than $80 billion. Before becoming comptroller, Mr. Hevesi spent twenty-two years in the State Assembly, where he authored 108 laws and established himself as a champion for affordable health care, education reform, and the rights of people with disabilities. A member of the Queens College faculty from 1967 through 1993, he was later an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Randall S. Kroszner served as a Senate-confirmed member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 2001 to 2003. While at CEA, Mr. Kroszner was heavily involved in the development of the Administration’s response to the corporate governance scandals and in shaping the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Upon leaving the CEA, Professor Kroszner returned to the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago where he is professor of Economics, editor of the Journal of Law & Economics, and associate director of the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. He is also a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Kroszner has done extensive research on corporate governance, conflicts on interest in financial services firms, and the role of bankers on the boards of non-financial services firms. Professor Kroszner has published more than fifty articles in a variety of periodicals and the leading scholarly journals. His paper on the evolution of corporate governance and managerial ownership since the Great Depression was awarded the Brattle Prize for the best corporate finance paper published in the Journal of Finance in 1999. He brings a unique combination of policy-maker and academic perspectives to bear on issues of corporate governance and financial accountability.

Eugene Scalia is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. He is a member of the firm's Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice Group and co-chair of its Labor and Employment Practice Group. Mr. Scalia returned to Gibson Dunn in March 2003 after serving as Solicitor of Labor, the principal legal officer of the U.S. Department of Labor. As solicitor, he oversaw nearly 500 lawyers in offices throughout the country, and was responsible for all Labor Department litigation and legal advice under the scores of laws administered by the department. Matters for which he had substantial responsibility included the Department's investigation of the Enron pension plans, and implementation of the new "whistleblower" provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate responsibility law. At Gibson Dunn, Mr. Scalia's private includes representing clients in rulemaking and legal proceedings involving a variety of federal agencies.

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. During 1986 and 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, published in December 2002 by Westview Press.

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