Willam C. Apgar is assistant secretary for housing at the Federal Housing Commission, a position he has held since October 1998. Mr. Apgar’s responsibilities include coordination the department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) mission regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Prior to that, he was an adviser to HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, first in the Office of Policy Development and Research and then in the Office of Housing. Prior to his appointment at HUD, Mr. Apgar was a lecturer on public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and executive director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies. Mr. Apgar’s research focuses on housing economics, regional and demographic analysis, and housing and community development policy analysis. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Committee for Boston Public Housing, a nonprofit organization committed to improving the quality of life of public housing residents, and served on the Board of Directors of the Newton Community Development Foundation.

Richard Baker represents Louisiana’s Sixth District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the chairman of the Banking Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Securities, and Government Sponsored Enterprises and is a member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. He previously served as a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives where he was chairman of the Committee on Transportation, Highways, and Public Works.

Jonathan A. Brown is director of the GIS and Financial Research Project at Essential Information, a position he has held since 1991. The GIS and Financial Research Project conducts research and publishes reports on consumer protection regulation within the financial service sector, access to housing and small business credit, community reinvestment performance of banking institutions, discrimination in mortgage lending, prudential regulation of banking institutions, antitrust policy in the financial service sector, and banking deregulation in developing countries. From 1989 to 1991 he was director of Research on Financial Democracy, a consulting firm to nonprofit organizations on financial regulation issues in Washington, D.C. Between 1985 and 1988 he was director of BankWatch. BankWatch was a consumer advocacy project of the Center for Study of Responsive Law, a public-interest research group. Mr. Brown has also served on several federal advisory committees including the GSE Working Group, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; the Consumer Advisory Council, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; and the Advisory Committee on National Banks, Comptroller of the Currency.

Francis Cavanaugh is a writer and public finance consultant. He is the author of The Truth about the National Debt: Five Myths and One Reality. In 1994 Mr. Cavanaugh retired after forty-two years of government service, including three years of military service in the U.S. Army. From 1986 t o 1994 he was the first executive director and chief executive officer of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board. Mr. Cavanaugh was an economist with the Department of the Treasury from 1954 to 1986, where he was the director of the department’s Office of Government Finance and Market Analysis. He was also the secretary and chief operating officer of the Federal Financing Bank. Mr. Cavanaugh received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive in the Senior Executive Service from Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush.

Ron Feldman is an assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, where he oversees applications, surveillance, and special studies. His research focuses on government-sponsored enterprises, deposit insurance, and federal budgeting. He analyzes trends affecting financial institutions and banking supervision policies ranging from subprime and agricultural lending to credit scoring. Previously, he analyzed federal credit and insurance programs for the Congressional Budget Office.

Edward L. Golding is senior vice president of housing economics and financial research at Freddie Mac. In this role, 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, he was 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. He has taught economics at the University of Florida and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dwight M. Jaffee has been professor of finance and real estate in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1991. He previously taught for many years in the economics department of Princeton University, where he also served as vice chairman. At UC Berkeley, Mr. Jaffee is currently the Booth Professor of Banking and Finance. He serves as 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 and is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Jaffee is the author of three monographs and numerous economic journal articles. His research covers areas such as real estate finance, catastrophe insurance, the California economy, credit rationing and bank lending, and international housing finance systems.

Stephen Moore is director of fiscal policy studies. Moore advocates privatization, and constitutional restraints on government spending and elimination of the income tax. His articles have appeared in major newspapers across the country, and he is a frequent guest on television and radio talk shows. Before joining Cato in 1990, Moore served as Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs at the Heritage Foundation and as research coordinator for President Reagan’s National Commission on Privatization. He is also a contributing editor of National Review and served on Time magazine’s Board of Economic Advisers. Currently, Mr. Moore is on leave from the Cato Institute to serve as president of the Club for Growth.

Mark G. Overend is senior vice president of SLM Holding Corp. (Sallie Mae). He joined Sallie Mae in 1986 as a director in the controller’s division, and was promoted to assistant vice president in 1988 and to vice president in 1989. He was promoted to controller in 1990 and to senior vice president and chief financial officer in 1997, where his responsibilities included the oversight of the treasury function, capital markets activity, financial planning and reporting, tax-planning and compliance functions. In March 2000, Mr. Overend assumed the leadership of the e-commerce and internet initiatives at Sallie Mae where he shapes the corporation’s internet strategy and business development efforts via the Web. Prior to joining Sallie Mae, Mr. Overend spent seven years with the auditing firm of Arthur Young & Company in Washington, D.C.

Marvin Phaup is deputy assistant director of the Microeconomics and Financial Studies Division at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). He has been at CBO since 1976. Previously he was senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Alex J. Pollock has been president and chief executive officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago since 1991 and is the architect of the Bank’s innovative Mortgage Partnership Finance (MPF) program. Mr. Pollock is the president of the International Union for Housing Finance, a life member of the Banking Research Center of Northwestern University, a director of the Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation and the Great Books Foundation, a trustee of the Illinois Council on Economic Education, and vice president of the Bankers Club of Chicago. He has received the American Enterprise Award from the Prairie Institute and the Rauen Legislative Award from the Illinois League of Financial Institutions for the development of MPF. Previously he was president and chief executive officer of Community Federal Savings in St. Louis; a visiting scholar at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank; president of the Marine Bank, N.A., in Milwaukee; and served at Continental Illinois National Bank in increasing responsibilities in Europe and Chicago. He is also the author of numerous articles on banking and management.

Robert S. Seiler, Jr., is manager of policy analysis at the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the safety and soundness regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From 1986 to 1994 and 1997 to 2000, he was a senior analyst with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), where he specialized in issues related to controlling and measuring the cost of federal credit programs, especially government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Mr. Seiler was the principal author of CBO's 1991 report on safety and soundness regulation of GSEs and has written papers on the size and allocation of federal subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and federal regulation of those two enterprises. He has also written CBO studies of federal credit support for the financing of U.S. exports, infrastructure, and higher education and on the federal budget process and concepts. From 1994 t0 1996, Mr. Seiler was a senior policy analyst at OFHEO, where he wrote chapters in two of the agency’s annual reports to the Congress. Before first joining CBO, he worked for the Senate Budget Committee, for two members of the House of Representatives, and in the private sector.

Thomas H. Stanton is an attorney in Washington, D.C. His legal and policy experience focuses on public institutions’ delivery of services, particularly federal credit and benefits programs, government corporations, and financial regulation. He has provided legal and policy counsel relating to the design and operation of federal programs. Mr. Stanton is a fellow of the Center for the Study of American Government at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches graduate seminars on the law of public institutions, government, and the American economy and on government and the credit markets. He is the chairman of the Standing Panel on Executive Organization and Management of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and has helped to teach NAPA’s seminar on government enterprises. His writing on government and the financial markets includes A State of Risk (HarperCollins, 1991), about government-sponsored enterprises, and many articles. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Financier: Analyses of Capital and Money Market Transactions.

Robert Van Order was named chief economist of Freddie Mac in June 1987. Prior to joining Freddie Mac, Mr. Van Order served as director of the Housing Finance Analysis Division at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and as visiting professor of real estate at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was an economist at HUD from 1976 to 1985, serving as director from 1982 to 1985. In addition to his position at UCLA, where he designed a course for MBA candidates focusing exclusively on the secondary mortgage market, Mr. Van Order taught at Purdue University, the University of Southern California, Queen’s University in Canada, American University and Ohio State University. He was also a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

Peter J. Wallison joined the AEI in January 1999 as a resident fellow and codirector of AEI’s program on financial market deregulation. Before joining AEI, he was a partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, where he practiced banking, corporate, and financial law in the firm’s Washington, D.C., and New York offices. As the general counsel of the Treasury Department from 1981 to 1985, Mr. Wallison had a significant role in the development of the Reagan administration’s proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. He was also the general counsel to the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee, and he participated in the department’s initial efforts to deal with the issue of the debts of less developed countries. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was counsel to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Back from the Brink (AEI Press), a proposal for a private deposit insurance system and coauthor of Nationalizing Mortgage Risk: The Growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (AEI Press). Mr. Wallison is admitted to practice before the courts of New York and the District of Columbia, and he is a member of the Bar Association of the City of New York and the District of Columbia Bar Association.

John C. Weicher is director of urban policy studies with the Hudson Institute. He was project director for Hudson’s Michigan Urban Policy Initiative from 1997 to 1999, designing the first state urban homeownership strategy in the United States. Prior to joining Hudson in 1993, he served for four years as assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He previously served as chief economist at HUD from 1975 to 1977 and at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget from 1987 to 1989. He is a past president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, and he received the association’s annual award for career achievement in 1993. He has served on the Committee on Urban Policy of the National Academy of Sciences and on the Advisory Committee on Population Statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau. He has held the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Chair in Public Policy Research at AEI and has directed the Housing and Financial Markets Program at the Urban Institute. He is the author or editor of twelve books and numerous scholarly and popular articles on housing, housing finance, and urban issues.