Speaker biographies
Sean Egan is a founding partner and the managing director of Egan-Jones Ratings Co., which was organized for the purpose of providing timely and accurate credit ratings. Egan-Jones was recognized as a rating firm by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late 2007. Unlike most other rating firms, Egan-Jones is not paid by issuers and has no conflicts of interest; its only clients are institutional investors. Egan-Jones is known for providing early warning on Bear Stearns, the monoline insurance firms, Countrywide, E-trade, New Century, California utilities, Collins & Aikman, Delphi, Enron, Genuity, Global Crossing, WorldCom, and many other credit problems well in advance of the majority of market participants. Prior to founding Egan-Jones, Mr. Egan was a commercial and investment banker.
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.
Sylvain Raynes is a founding principal of the New York-based R&R Consulting, where he specializes in nonrecourse debt financing, including project finance and securitization. He is also a New York Institute of Finance faculty member and an associate professor at Baruch College. Prior to working at R&R, Mr. Raynes was a structurer for Paine Webber before it was acquired by UBS and a risk manager for Credit Suisse First Boston. He became involved in structured finance in 1995 as a senior analyst for Moody's Investors Service, where he developed the Moody's approaches to intellectual property, structured settlements, aircraft leases, charge cards, insurance premiums, tax liens, and defaulted receivables securitizations. Before that, he was a forensic statistical analyst for Goldman Sachs. He left the aerospace industry in the late 1980s to build Citigroup's first modern scoring model for a then-$30 billion consumer credit card business. He is the author of Elements of Structured Finance (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Analysis of Structured Securities (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Joshua Rosner is a managing director at the independent research consultancy 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 Global Advisors, Mr. Rosner was an executive vice president at CIBC World Markets and a senior vice president at its predecessor firm, Oppenheimer and Company.
Erik R. Sirri is the director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In this role, he is responsible for matters relating to the regulation of stock and option exchanges, national securities associations, brokers, dealers, clearing agencies, and credit rating agencies. He is on leave from Babson College, where he is a professor of finance. From 1996 to 1999, he served as the chief economist of the SEC. Prior to joining the SEC, he was an assistant professor of finance at Harvard Business School and spent time working on planetary astronomy missions for NASA and on space surveillance sensors in the aerospace industry. He has served as a governor of the Boston Stock Exchange and a member of the regulatory board of the Boston Options Exchange. Mr. Sirri has consulted for securities firms, stock exchanges, mutual fund companies, issuers, and information vendors on a variety of regulatory and business matters, and his published writings appear in academic journals, practitioner journals, and books. His research interests include the interaction of securities law and finance, securities market structure, securities trading, and the investment management industry.
Lawrence J. White is the Arthur E. Imperatore Professor of Economics and the deputy chair of the economics department at New York University's Stern School of Business. From 1986 to 1989, he was on leave from Stern to serve as a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and from 1982 to 1983, he was on leave to serve as the director of the economic policy office in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Mr. White is currently the general editor of the Review of Industrial Organization and the secretary-treasurer of the Western Economic Association International. He served on the senior staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1978 to 1979 and was the chairman of Stern's economics department from 1990 to 1995. Mr. White is the author of numerous books, including The S&L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation (Oxford University Press, 1991), and has published articles in many leading economics and law journals. He is the editor or coeditor of eleven volumes, including The Antitrust Revolution: Economics, Competition, and Policy, with John E. Kwoka (fifth edition, Oxford University Press, 2009); Structural Change in Banking, with Michael Klausner (Irwin, 1993); and Bank Management and Regulation, with Anthony Sanders and Gregory F. Udell (Mayfield, 1992). Mr. White was the North American editor of The Journal of Industrial Economics from 1984 to 1987 and 1990 to 1995.
View Event Details
