Speakers at the Financial Crisis Conference at the Graduate Center
Daniel Alpert
Daniel Alpert is the Managing Partner at Westwood Capital LLC and its affiliates and a senior fellow in financial macroeconomics and lecturer in Cornell Law School. He has more than 30 years of international merchant banking and investment banking experience, including a wide variety of work-out and bankruptcy related restructuring experience.
He was the investment banker who led the first ever rated commercial mortgage backed security issue backed by a pool of mortgage loans acquired from a distressed lender, the first rated commercial mortgage backed security issue backed by a pool of mortgage loans secured by properties owned by a single borrower, the only REIT IPO involving the simultaneous public offering of common stock and the acquisition of a portfolio of properties out of a Chapter 11 proceeding, and the first securitization of gaming revenues. He has additional expertise in evaluating and maximizing the recoveries from failed financing vehicles affiliated with a common borrower/issuer. All of these activities involve a common element – thinking “outside the box” to provide novel and workable solutions to unique financial challenges.
Dan’s experience in providing financial advisory services and structured finance execution has extended Westwood’s reach beyond the U.S. domestic corporate finance market to East Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In addition to his structured finance expertise, Dan has extensive experience advising on mergers, acquisitions and private equity financings.
Dan is best known for his writing on the financial crisis of the 2007-8, and his articles and papers on the US housing market, banking, regulatory matters and global macroeconomics.
He has provided expert testimony in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in cases involving debtors involved in structured finance transactions. Dan has written extensive research and opinion on the housing and credit bubbles and the resulting economic crisis, and is widely quoted in print outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Reuters, AP and Bloomberg wires, Forbes, Fortune and many other periodicals. He is a frequent guest commentator on all of the principal business news networks – Bloomberg, CNBC and Fox Business News – and also appears on CNNI and the BBC. Prior to forming Westwood Capital in 1995, Dan was a senior banker with, and partner of, Oppenheimer & Co., Inc.
Neil M. Barofsky
Neil M. Barofsky, is a partner at Jenner & Block, serving on the Management Committee as a well-known authority on issues at the intersection of economics, law, business, policy and politics. He was the former federal prosecutor and as the Presidentially-appointed first special inspector general of the historic US$700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) In 2015, he was named one of The National Law Journal’s “Winning” litigators and recognized by The National Law Journal as a regulatory and compliance “Trailblazer.”
Mr. Barofsky was appointed to monitor to Credit Suisse Securities, Credit Suisse AG, represented non-profit homeowner assistance groups in civil litigation against California governor Jerry Brown, senior executives at CEO and Director level in state and federal criminal and regulatory investigations and served as national counsel to a group of consumer installment lenders and loan servicers facing civil litigation and regulatory enforcement actions throughout the United States, including a first-of-its-kind lawsuit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
In his role as chief watchdog for TARP, he created and oversaw a law enforcement division that conducted criminal and civil investigations of fraud and abuse linked to the bailout program, resulting in recoveries or avoided losses of more than $700 million in taxpayer money and which has led to more than 130 fraud convictions to date. He also established and oversaw an audit division that created reports that brought greater transparency and accountability to TARP.
Previously, Mr. Barofsky was a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. He is the recipient of the US Attorney General’s John Marshall Award, the Department of Justice’s highest award for excellence in legal performance, and the Executive Office of the United States Attorneys’ Director’s Award for Superior Performance.
Mr. Barofsky was Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law’s Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, an adjunct professor at the law school and affiliated with the Mitchell Jacobson Leadership Program on Law and Business. He is a frequent speaker and commentator on issues related to financial regulation, was a senior contributing editor for Bloomberg TV, and has written opinion columns for publications such as The New York Times, the Financial Times, The New Republic, Bloomberg, Reuters and others. He is also the author of Bailout, his bestselling book about his experiences as SIGTARP.
Jesse Eisinger
Jesse Eisinger is a senior reporter at ProPublica, covering Wall Street and finance. He writes a regular column for The New York Times’s Dealbook section.
In April 2011, he and Jake Bernstein were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He and Bernstein were also finalists for the 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for the series.
Prior to joining ProPublica, Eisinger was the Wall Street editor of Conde Nast Portfolio, where he wrote a November 2007 cover story titled “Wall Street Requiem,” in which he predicted the demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Before joining Portfolio, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, where he was the founding writer of two market commentary columns, and he played a leading role in exposing accounting fraud at Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie. During his tenure at The Wall Street Journal’s European edition in London, Eisinger won a “Best in Business” award from the UK-based World Leadership Forum for his coverage of accounting irregularities at the Irish drug maker Elan Corp. Earlier in his career, he covered biotechnology and pharmaceuticals for TheStreet.com and Dow Jones Newswires. Prior to that, he lived and worked as a journalist in Chile.
Richard W. Fisher
Richard W. Fisher is Senior Advisor to Barclays Plc. (a British bank holding company) and a Director of PepsiCo, ATT and Tenet Healthcare. He is a Contributing Editor for CNBC.
From 2005 to 2015 Mr. Fisher was President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In this role, Fisher served as a member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Federal Reserve’s principal monetary policymaking group. He also served as the chair of the Conference of Federal Reserve Bank Presidents, the chair of the IT Oversight Committee for the 12 Federal Reserve banks.
Prior to becoming the president of the Dallas Fed in 2005, Mr. Fisher was Vice-Chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a strategic advisory firm, in partnership with Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Mack McLarty, former White House Chief of Staff in the Clinton Administration. He was also Senior Advisor of FCM Investors in Dallas, Texas, an investment advisory firm that he founded in 1987. He simultaneously served as Senior Advisor to the law firm of Covington & Burling. He was a member of the Board of Directors of EDS.
From 1997 to 2001, Mr. Fisher was Deputy United States Trade Representative with the rank of Ambassador, responsible for U.S. trade policy and negotiations in Asia, Latin America, and Mexico and Canada. Earlier, Mr. Fisher also served as Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury to the Carter Administration.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College at Oxford University, a trustee of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, the American Council on Germany and the John Tower Institute at Southern Methodist University, and a trustee of Southwestern Medical Foundation at the University of Texas. He also served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard.
Mr. Fisher is a recipient of the Service to Democracy Award and Dwight D. Eisenhower Medal for Public Service from the American Assembly, the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service, the Order of the Aztec Eagle award, the highest honor given by the Mexican government to foreigners and the Neil Mallon Award, presented by former Secretary of state George Shultz. Mr. Fisher has been involved in a long history of charitable activities and endowed various university fellowships.
Rana Foroohar
Rana Foroohar is Global Business Columnist and an Associate Editor at the Financial Times. She is also CNN [edition.cnn.com]’s global economic analyst. Her book, “Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business” (Crown), about why the capital markets no longer support business, was shortlisted for the Financial Times McKinsey Book of the Year award in 2016. Prior to joining the FT and CNN, Foroohar spent 6 years at TIME, as an assistant managing editor and economic columnist. She previously spent 13 years at Newsweek, as an economic and foreign affairs editor and a foreign correspondent covering Europe and the Middle East. During that time, she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz Prize for transatlantic reporting. She has also received awards and fellowships from institutions such as the Johns Hopkins School of International Affairs and the East West Center. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Robert C. Hockett
Robert C. Hockett is Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Professor of Public Affairs at Cornell University.
Hockett works in the fields of law, philosophy, and finance. His primary research includes banking and financial institutions, financial and monetary macroeconomics, money and central banking, distributive justice and social choice, enterprise-organizational law and economics, industrial policy and economic development, and international trade and monetary law. He frequently publishes, testifies, presents and commentates as an expert on these and related topics in scholarly journals, before courts and legislatures, at academic and related conference venues, and in news publications and programs such as the New York Times, the Washington Post,the Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reuters,Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, Newsweek, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
Hockett has previously worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the International Monetary Fund. He is a member of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Banking Law and a past Chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Financial Institutions, as well as a founding Board Member of Samasource International. He is also a Research Scholar with the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity at Denison University, a past Fellow with the Global Interdependence Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and a regular columnist for both the Huffington Post and The Hill, covering policy issues of concern to lawmakers in Washington DC.
Hockett also advises legislators and regulators on finance-regulatory matters, and has testified before the U.S. Senateand the U.S. House of Representatives on the same. Hockett earned his B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Kansas where he was also selected as a Rhodes Scholar. While at Oxford he earned a Master’s in Philosophy & Economics and later earned LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from Yale University.
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Distinguished Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an op-ed columnist at TheNew York Times. He is also Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, a member of the Group of Thirty international economic body and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Before joining the Graduate Center, he was a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School; prior to his appointment at Princeton, he served on the faculties of MIT, Yale and Stanford. In 2008, he was the sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade theory. He has also received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association and the Asturias Award given by King of Spain, considered to be the European Pulitzer Prize. He is the author or editor of more than 25 books and over 200 published professional articles. His four recent trade books, End This Depression Now!, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, The Conscience of a Liberal and The Great Unraveling became New York Times bestsellers. He has served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers at the Reagan White House, as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and to foreign countries including Portugal and the Philippines. His approach to economics is reaching a new generation of college students through his coauthored college textbooks on micro- and macroeconomics that are among the top-selling economics textbooks used in U.S. colleges.
Patricia C. Mosser
Patricia C. Mosser is Director of the MPA Program in Economic Policy Management at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and leads the school’s Initiative on Central Banking and Financial Policy. Previously, Mosser was head of the Research and Analysis Center at the Office of Financial Research, U.S. Treasury Department. Mosser spent over 20 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where she was a senior manager at the Fed’s open market desk overseeing market analysis, monetary policy implementation, foreign exchange operations, and analysis of financial stability and reform. During the financial crisis, she oversaw many of the liquidity facilities, and in 2009 served as the System Open Market Account Manager for the FOMC, with responsibility for analysis and implementation of monetary policy, including the first round of large-scale purchases of Treasury and agency mortgage securities. She previously served as an economist and manager in the New York Fed Research Department and as an assistant professor in the Economics Department at Columbia. Mosser has written on financial stability and monetary policy topics including financial reform, crisis policy tools, and the monetary transmission mechanism.
Jeffery D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor at Columbia, leader in sustainable development, senior Special Advisor to United Nations under several Secretary-Generals, bestselling author, and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 100 countries. He is the recipient of many awards and prizes for environmental leadership. He has twice been named among Timemagazine’s 100 most influential world leaders. Professor Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.
Sachs is currently Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network under the auspices of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and a Commissioner of the ITU/UNESCOBroadband Commission for Development. He is Chair and Founder of SDG USA, a non-governmental initiative to promote the Sustainable Development Goal concepts in the United States. Sachs is also co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and was director of the Millennium Villages Project (2005-2015). For more than thirty years he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He was among the outside advisors to Pope John Paul II on the encyclical Centesimus Annus and in recent years has worked closely with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences on the issues of sustainable development, especially in the context of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’.
Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). His recent books include: To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013), The Age of Sustainable Development (2015) and Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair & Sustainable (2017). He is a frequent contributor to major publications such as the Financial Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, Scientific American, and Time magazine.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist for The New York Times and the founder and editor-at-large of Deal Book, an online daily financial report published by The Times that he started in 2001. In addition, Mr. Sorkin is an assistant editor of business and finance news, helping guide and shape the paper’s coverage.
Mr. Sorkin is also a co-anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC’s signature morning program.
Mr. Sorkin is the author of the award winning “Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and themselves” (Viking, 2009), which chronicled the events of the 2008 financial crisis. The book was adapted as a movie HBO Films in 2011. Mr. Sorkin was a co-producer of the film, which was nominated for 11 Emmy Awards. Mr. Sorkin is also co-creator of the drama series “Billions” on Showtime starring Paul Giamatti and Damien Lewis.
Mr. Sorkin reported extensively on the financial crisis of 2008, its aftermath on Wall Street and the government bailout of major investment banks, with coverage including the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the A.I.G. bailout. He has broken news of deals including Chase’s acquisition of J.P. Morgan and Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Compaq. He also led The Times’s coverage of Vodafone’s $183 billion hostile bid for Mannesmann, resulting in the world’s largest takeover ever.
Mr. Sorkin is a frequent guest on national television and radio programs, as well as a lecturer at universities across the country. He has appeared on NBC’s “Today Show,” PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show,” PBS’s “News Hour,” NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” and many others. He won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2004 for breaking the news of I.B.M.’s historic sale of its PC business to Lenovo. He was also a finalist in the commentary category for his DealBook column. He also won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award for breaking news in 2005 and in 2006. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.
Mr. Sorkin began writing for The Times in 1995 before graduating from high school. His personal website is andrewrosssorkin.com.
Conference Organizers
Merih Uctum
Merih Uctum is professor of International Macroeconomics and Finance at the Graduate Center/Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Uctum’s research includes work on international portfolio flows and foreign direct investment; international financial integration; financial crises; corporate profits; exchange rates and sustainability of foreign debt and intertemporal solvency; she serves as a member of the Board of Economic Advisors to the New York State Assembly Ways and Means Committee. Previously Uctum was the Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before joining CUNY, she was a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She received a Ph.D. in economics from Queen’s University, Canada.
Veronica Manlow
Veronica Manlow is an associate professor in the Business Management department of the Koppelman School of Business at Brooklyn College. Her current research involves an investigation of the luxury labor performed by artisans in ateliers and factory workers in large conglomerates in Europe and the USA. She wrote Designing Clothes in which she explored the creative process of fashion design, and organization culture and leadership in corporate fashion brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. She co-edited a book entitled Global Fashion Brands: Style, Luxury, History and is a section editor of The Fashion Business Reader which will be published in 2018. She is a guest editor of a special issue on luxury production in the journal Design, Business & Society to be published in October 2018. She is one of the organizers of the international In Pursuit of Luxury Conference which is a dialogue between industry and academia on questions surrounding luxury as a concept, practice, product and industry. Her PhD is in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.