Bert Ely of Ely & Co. has specialized in deposit insurance and banking structure since 1981. In 1986, he became an early predictor of the Savings & Loan crisis and of a taxpayer bailout of the FSLIC. Mr. Ely continuously monitors conditions in the banking and S&L industries, monetary policy, and the growing federalization of credit risk. He has helped to draft legislation to enact the cross guarantee concept for privatizing banking regulation and its related deposit insurance and systematic risks. He has testified on numerous occasions before congressional committees on banking issues, and he often speaks on these matters to bankers and other audiences. Mr. Ely established his consulting practice in 1972. Before that, he was the chief financial officer of a public company, a consultant with Touch, Ross & Company, and an auditor with Ernst & Ernst.

W. Scott Frame is a financial economist and assistant policy adviser in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His primary research interests are in the areas of financial institutions, credit markets, industrial organization, and public policy. Before joining the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta 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; Journal of Financial Services Research; and Review of Industrial Organization.

Ed Golding is the senior vice president of housing economics and financial research at Freddie Mac. He is responsible for economic analysis of the housing and mortgage markets and the capital planning for Freddie Mac. Before joining Freddie Mac in 1989, Mr. Golding was a special assistant to a board member at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, at that time the government oversight agency for the savings and loan industry, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and Freddie Mac.

Dwight M. Jaffee has been a professor of finance and real estate at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business since 1991. He previously taught for many years in the economics department of Princeton University, where he served as its vice chairman. At UC 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---UC 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 such diverse areas as catastrophe and casualty insurance, real estate finance, international housing finance systems, credit rationing and bank lending, and the California economy.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) is a leader among moderates in the Republican Party. He advocates fiscally conservative and socially moderate views both in Congress and on the national stage and is a frequent guest on political talk shows, including Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Crossfire, Hardball, and Hannity and Colmes. Rep. Shays’s fiscal responsibility consistently wins the highest rankings from the Concord Coalition, National Taxpayers Union, and Citizens Against Government Waste. He was the driving force behind the Congressional Accountability Act, which requires Congress to live by the laws it sets for the rest of the country. Rep. Shays chairs the Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, which oversees the Departments of State, Defense, and Veterans Affairs. In this role he is working to reduce the threat of chemical and biological weapons and prepare our emergency response teams to handle potential terrorist attacks, improve pay and living conditions for American soldiers, decrease the serious backlog of security clearance investigations, and improve financial and inventory management in the Pentagon.

Ray Soifer established Soifer Consulting, LLC, a strategy consulting firm focused on global financial services. Widely quoted by the international financial media, Mr. Soifer frequently speaks at industry gatherings and client meetings in the United States and Europe. He retired in 2000 as a senior vice president of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., where he served for seventeen years as the firm’s senior sell-side equity analyst following banking, investment banking, and related financial services. Before coming to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in 1983, Mr. Soifer served for ten years in various management and investment banking positions at Bankers Trust, including as the head of corporate long-range planning. From 1970 to 1973, he served in Washington as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of commerce for maritime affairs.

Steven Thomas works with Financial Security Assurance, Inc., a monoline bond insurance company, most recently as its associate general counsel. In that capacity, he has concentrated on structured finance and mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by the firm. Mr. Thomas was an associate with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton from 1985 through 1991, working in the area of mortgage-backed securities and structured finance. While at Cleary, he had primary responsibility for the Salomon Brothers CMO trust program and worked on a wide variety of other mortgage-backed and related structured securitization products.

Larry D. Wall is a research officer for the financial structure team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In addition to pursuing his research agenda, Mr. Wall gives policy advice and evaluates and provides counsel on staff research and professional activities. A certified public accountant, Mr. Wall is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Financial Management Association and was formerly the chair of its institutional directors. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Banking and Finance. Mr. Wall has also been an adjunct faculty member at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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 the counsel to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Back from the Brink, 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 editor of Optional Federal Chartering of Insurance Companies and Serving Two Masters Yet out of Control, all of which have been published by the AEI Press.

Susan E. Woodward has been a professor of price theory, finance, and financial institutions at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester, and University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1985, Ms. Woodward was the senior staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, working on policy issues in financial markets and institutions. From 1987 to 1991, she was the chief economist and deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, working mainly on mortgage-market and RESPA issues. Her third and final Washington assignment was as the chief economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where she focused on economic issues in market organization and trading, securities law enforcement, and other policy issues in disclosure. Since 1995, Ms. Woodward has been teaching, consulting, and writing. She was a chief economist and executive vice president for research at OffRoad Capital, an Internet-based investment bank whose auction system she designed. Last year she started her own new business, Sand Hill Econometrics, which publishes an index for venture capital that is the analog of the S&P 500 for private companies that seek funding from outside investors.