April 5, 2004
Speaker Biographies
John Barnett is a senior analyst at the Center for Financial Research and Analysis. His primary responsibility is researching unusual or aggressive accounting practices at companies in the financial services and industrial industries. He also focuses broadly on issues in securitization and derivative accounting for the firm. Before joining CFRA, Mr. Barnett was an analyst at Fidelity Research and Management covering high-yield fixed income and an analyst at Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) covering Hungarian stocks.
Albert Gavalis is a licensed CPA and licensed attorney registered with various consulting agencies. Mr. Gavalis has over ten years experience as an agency-based consultant at major financial firms covering overlapping issues in finance, accounting, tax, and law. Mr. Gavalis has dealt with complex and comprehensive issues ranging from Financial Accounting Standards Board tax-compliance analysis in a credit derivatives environment through coordinating $Billion syndicated loans. He has performed review and recommendations on accounting policy memorandums and pricing methodologies/justifications.
Mark Haefele is chief financial officer and chief operating officer of Sonic Capital and serves as comanager for a Boston-based hedge fund. An economic historian by training, he believes the most powerful force in financial markets is mean reversion. Mr. Haefele focuses on using bottom-up research to locate misvalued stocks and build a long-short equity portfolio.
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 U.S. 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.
