October 28, 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.

Bert Ely is a financial institutions and monetary policy consultant. The principal at Ely & Company, Inc., in Alexandria, Virginia, he has specialized in deposit insurance and banking-structure issues since 1981. In 1986, he was one of the first to publicly predict a taxpayer bailout of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. He monitors conditions in the banking and thrift industries, the politics of the credit-allocation process, and issues concerning monetary policy and the payments system.

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.

Dwight M. Jaffee has been a professor of finance and real estate at the University of California–Berkeley’s Haas School of Business since 1991. He previously taught for many years in the Department of Economics at Princeton University, where he served as vice chairman. At Berkeley, Mr. Jaffee is currently the Booth Professor of Banking and Finance and serves as a cochairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, with special responsibilities for the center’s research program. He is also the academic director of the St. Petersburg University-Berkeley School of Management Program and has been in that post since the program’s inception in 1993. He has consulted in recent years with the World Bank on its programs involving both Russia and China. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Axa/Barr Rosenburg Mutual Funds. Mr. Jaffee is the author of three monographs and dozens of economics journal articles. His research covers diverse topics such as catastrophe and casualty insurance, real estate finance, international housing finance systems, credit rationing and bank lending, and the California economy.

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.