Speaker Biographies

Bert Ely has specialized in deposit insurance and banking structure issues since 1981. As the Savings and Loan situation worsened, he became in 1986 one of the first persons to publicly predict a taxpayer bailout of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. In 1991, Mr. Ely was the first person to correctly predict the noncrisis in commercial banking; in 1992, he predicted an eventual taxpayer bailout of the Japanese banking system. On an ongoing basis, Mr. Ely monitors conditions in the banking and S&L industries, monetary policy, and the growing role of the federal government in the credit allocation process. He has helped to draft legislation to enact the cross-guarantee concept for privatizing banking regulation and its related deposit insurance risk. Mr. Ely has testified on numerous occasions before congressional committees on banking issues, and he often speaks on these matters to bankers and others. Mr. Ely first established his consulting practice in 1972. Before that, he was the chief financial officer of a public company, a consultant with Touche, Ross & Company, and an auditor with Ernst & Ernst.

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 Practical Plan for Privatizing Deposit Insurance and Strengthening Our Banks and Thrifts, 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 Optional Federal Chartering and Regulation of Insurance Companies, all of which have been published by the AEI Press.