February 3, 2005
Speaker Biographies
Michael DeStefano is a managing director in the financial institutions Group of Standard & Poor's Ratings Group. He is that department’s chief quality and criteria officer, in which capacity he has responsibility for broad analytical oversight of the ratings of global financial services. He is also the primary analyst on Fannie Mae and part of the team that follows the GSEs in the United States. Mr. DeStefano has worked in the commercial real estate and tax-exempt housing areas. Prior to l985, he was training director and a financial institutions analyst in the equity department of Standard & Poor's, which he joined in l981.
Robert Eisenbeis is executive vice president and director of research of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In addition to advising the bank president on monetary policy and related matters, Mr. Eisenbeis oversees the research, public affairs and statistical reports departments. He also serves as a member of the bank's Management and Discount Committees.
W. Scott Frame is a financial economist and associate policy adviser on the financial team in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Prior to joining the Bank in 2001, Mr. Frame was a senior financial economist at the U.S Treasury Department from 1996 to 2000. He has published in several journals, including the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; the Journal of Economic Literature; and the Journal of Financial Services Research.
Larry Wall is a financial economist and policy advisor in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and an adjunct professor of finance at Emory University. Mr. Wall has published a number of papers in leading financial economics journals and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial Stability, and the Financial Review.
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 L.L.P, 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 wrote Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency, published in December 2002 by Westview Press.
