Mr. Silvers is a member of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board Standing Advisory Group, the Financial Accounting Standards Board User Advisory Council, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Corporate Governance Task Force, the New York Stock Exchange’s Stock Options Voting Task Force and was a member of the Advisory Committee on Analyst Independence to the House Capital Markets Subcommittee. He is a member of the American Bar Association’s Subcommittee on International Corporate Governance. Mr. Silvers received his J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School. He received his M.B.A. with high honors from Harvard Business School and is a Baker Scholar. Mr. Silvers is a graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude, and has studied history at Kings College, Cambridge University.

Black developed the concept of “control fraud” – frauds in which the leader uses the entity as a “weapon.” Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined and kill and maim thousands. He helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives, served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s CEO, and assisted Icelandic and French leaders responding to their financial crises. Black has testified to Congress four times about the financial crisis – financial derivatives, executive and professional compensation, Lehman’s failure and related regulatory failures, and the role of control fraud in the bubble and crisis. He is a regulatory columnist for Benzinga

His 1989 book Market Volatility (MIT Press) is a mathematical and behavioral analysis of price fluctuations in speculative markets. His 1993 book Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society’s Largest Economic Risks (Oxford University Press) proposes a variety of new risk-management contracts, such as futures contracts in national incomes or securities based on real estate that would permit the management of risks to standards of living. His book Irrational Exuberance (Princeton 2000, Broadway Books 2001, 2nd edition Princeton 2005) is an analysis and explication of speculative bubbles, with special reference to the stock market and real estate. His book The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2003) is an analysis of an expanding role of finance, insurance, and public finance in our future. His book Subprime Solution: How the Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It, published in September 2008 by Princeton University Press, offers an analysis of the housing and economic crisis and a plan of action against it. He co-authored, with George A. Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism published in March 2009 by Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Randall Kroszner Reforming U.S. Financial Markets: Reflections before and beyond Dodd-Frank published in March 2011 by MIT Press.

Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then as the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, helping to resolve the Asian and global financial crises. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and numerous other prominent public and private institutions have drawn upon his consulting expertise.

He has published over 70 theoretical, empirical and policy papers on international macroeconomic issues and coauthored the books “Political Cycles: Theory and Evidence” (MIT Press, 1997) and “Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets” (Institute for International Economics, 2004) and “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance” (Penguin Press, 2010).

Dr. Roubini’s views on global economic issues are widely cited by the media, and he is a frequent commentator on various business news programs. He has been the subject of extended profiles in the New York Times Magazine and other leading current-affairs publications. The Financial Times has provided extensive coverage of Dr. Roubini’s perspectives.

He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a co-founder of BaselineScenario.com (a much cited website on the global economy), a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers, and a member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee.

Prof. Johnson is a weekly contributor to NYT.com’s Economix, is a regular Bloomberg columnist, has a monthly article with Project Syndicate that runs in publications around the world, and has published high impact opinion pieces recently in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, and The Financial Times, among other places. In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as contributing business editor. Professor Johnson is the co-author, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown, a bestselling assessment of the dangers now posed by the US financial sector (published March 2010) and White House Burning:  The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why it Matters to You (April 2012).

In his roles as a professor, research fellow and author, Johnson’s speaking engagements include paid appearances before various business groups, including financial institutions and other companies, as well before other groups that may have a political agenda. He is not on the board of any company, does not currently serve as a consultant to anyone, and does not work as an expert witness or conduct sponsored research. His investment portfolio comprises cash and broadly diversified mutual funds; he does not trade stocks, bonds, derivatives or other financial products actively.

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Johnson was the International Monetary Fund’s Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. He is a co-director of the NBER Africa Project, and works with non-profits and think tanks around the world.

In 2009, she co-chaired a task force within Americans for Financial Reform that helped shape key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  In 2008, she served as the Deputy Policy Director in charge of Domestic and Economic Policy with the John Edwards for President campaign, helping craft that campaign’s agenda-setting policies to end poverty, halt global climate change, reform financial services, and other far-reaching aims.  She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law

Naomi Klein’s first book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies released in 2000 was an international bestseller translated into over 25 languages with more than a million copies in print. The New York Times called it “a movement bible.” In 2011, Time Magazine named it as one of the Top 100 non-fiction books published since 1923. A tenth anniversary edition of No Logo was published worldwide in 2010. The Literary Review of Canada has named it one of the hundred most important Canadian books ever published. A collection of her writing, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate was published in 2002. Naomi Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone, and writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Additionally, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, El Pais, L’Espresso and The New Statesman, among many other publications.

He serves as Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, as well as Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Health Policy and Management.  He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).

Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on economic development and the fight against poverty.  His work on ending poverty, promoting economic growth, fighting hunger and disease, and promoting sustainable environmental practices, has taken him to more than 125 countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s population.  For more than a quarter century he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.  He also advised Pope John Paul II on the encyclical Centesimus Annus. He works closely with international organizations including the African Union, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme, UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, among others.

Professor Sachs’ work has been pivotal in many of the key junctures of globalization during the past thirty years.  In the 1980s he helped several Latin American countries including Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to end hyperinflations and renegotiate their external debts.  He was the leading academic advocate in the United States for reducing the debt overhang of the developing countries and his ideas were incorporated in the global debt-reduction plans undertaken from the mid-1980s onward, including the Brady Plan and the HIPC Program.

In 1989, Professor Sachs advised Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement and the first post-communist Government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.  He wrote the first-ever comprehensive plan for the transition from central planning to a market democracy, which became incorporated into Poland’s highly successful reform program led by Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz.  Professor Sachs was the main architect of Poland’s successful debt reduction operation.  The Government of Poland awarded Sachs with one of its highest honors in 1999, the Commanders Cross of the Order of Merit.  He also received an honorary doctorate from the Cracow University of Economics.

Sachs’s ideas and methods of transition from central planning were successfully adopted throughout the transition economies.  He helped Slovenia (1991) and Estonia (1992) to introduce new stable and convertible currencies.  Based on Poland’s success, he was invited first by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then by Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the transition to a market economy.  He served as advisor to Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris Federov during 1991-93 on macroeconomic policies.  He received the Leontief Medal of the Leontief Centre, St. Petersburg, for his contributions to Russia’s economic reforms.

From the mid-1990s till today, Prof. Sachs has been involved with economic reforms in many parts of Asia, including India and China.  He has been a senior advisor to the Indian Government, most recently on the scaling up of primary health care in rural areas (the National Rural Health Mission), a policy that he recommended and helped to promote through the Indian Commission on Macroeconomics and Health.  For his broad-based support of India’s economic reforms he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, one of India’s highest honors. He has similarly engaged with the Chinese Government on many issues of sustainable development, and during 2001-3 worked with senior government officials on China’s Western Development Strategy.  He has authored many scholarly and policy papers on India’s and China’s economic reforms.  Sachs has also worked in other parts of Asia on a number of development and research projects, including in Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and others. He actively supports Bhutan’s innovative strategy of Gross National Happiness. He works with the Government of Jordan on a national program of poverty reduction and with the Government of Qatar on education and ICT initiatives throughout the Arab region.

Since 1995, Professor Sachs has been deeply engaged in Africa’s escape from poverty.  He has worked in more than two-dozen African countries, and has advised the African leadership at several African Union summits.  In the mid-1990s he worked with senior officials of the Clinton Administration to develop the concept of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).  He has engaged with dozens of African leaders to promote smallholder agriculture and to fight high disease burdens through strengthened primary health systems.  His pioneering ideas on investing in health to break the poverty trap have been widely applied throughout the continent.  He currently serves as an advisor to several African governments, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda, among others.

The Millennium Villages Project, which he directs, operates in more than one dozen African countries, and covers more than 500,000 people. The MVP has achieved notable successes in raising agricultural production, reducing children’s stunting, and cutting child mortality rates, with the results described in several peer-reviewed publications. Its key concepts of integrated rural development to achieve the MDGs are now being applied at national scale in Nigeria and Mali, and are being used by many other countries to help support national anti-poverty programs. He works very closely with the Islamic Development Bank to scale up programs of integrated rural development and sustainable agriculture among the Bank’s member countries. One such project supports pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa, with six participating nations: Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan.

Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, Professor Sachs has been the leading academic scholar and practitioner on the MDGs.  He chaired the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2000-1), which played a pivotal role in scaling up the financing of health care and disease control in the low-income countries to support MDGs 4, 5, and 6.  He worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000-1 to design and launch the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.  He worked closely with senior officials of the administration of George W. Bush to develop the PEPFAR program to fight HIV/AIDS, and the PMI to fight malaria. On behalf of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, from 2002-2006 he chaired the UN Millennium Project, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the MDGs.  The UN General Assembly adopted the key recommendations of the UN Millennium Project at a special session in September 2005. The recommendations for rural Africa are currently being implemented and documented in the Millennium Villages, and in several national scale-up efforts such as in Nigeria.

Professor Sachs has been the Director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University since 2002.  In that capacity, he leads a university-wide organization of more than 850 professionals from natural-science and social-science disciplines, in support of sustainable development.  Sachs has consistently advocated for the expansion of University education on sustainable development, and helped to introduce the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, one of the first PhD programs of its kind in the U.S.  He championed the new Masters of Development Practice (MDP), which has led to a consortium of major universities around the world offering the new degree.  The Earth Institute has also guided the adoption of sustainable development as a new major at Columbia College.  The Earth Institute is home to cutting-edge research on all aspects of earth systems and sustainable development.

Sachs is the recipient of many awards and honors, including membership in the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Fellows of the World Econometric Society.  He has received more than 20 honorary degrees, and many awards and honors around the world. His syndicated newspaper column appears in more than 80 countries around the world, and he is a frequent contributor to major publications such as the Financial Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, Scientific American, and Time magazine.

Sachs’ policy and academic works span the challenges of globalization, and include: the relationship of trade and economic growth; the resource curse and extractive industries; public health and economic development; economic geography; strategies of economic reform; international financial markets; macroeconomic policy; global competitiveness; climate change; and the end of poverty. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.

Prior to his arrival at Columbia University in July 2002, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development and the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.

Sachs was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 1976, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 and 1980 respectively. He joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982 and Full Professor in the fall of 1983, at the age of 28.

She is a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Dr. Kelton has a B.S. in Business Finance and a B.A. in Economics, both from California State University, Sacramento(1995). After finishing her undergraduate degrees, she completed an M.Phil in Economics at Cambridge University, England(1997). She then spent a year at The Levy Economics Institute on a fellowship she won through Christ’s College, Cambridge.

While at the Levy Institute, she wrote a number of papers that became part of her Ph.D. dissertation at the New School for Social Research (April 2001), titled Public Policy and Government Finance: A Comparative Analysis Under Different Monetary Systems. She is creator and editor of New Economic Perspectives, a top-ranked economics blog, and has been featured in: Common Dreams, Business Insider, Truthdig, Counter Punch, Wall St. Pit, Credit Writedowns, and many more.

Now we have had, of course, the Knight Capital meltdown. I’ve also come across some other things well worth reading, among them Scott Patterson’s excellent Dark Pools(which I reviewed here),a new Wired feature, Raging Bulls, and among several by Felix Salmon this blog post with an astounding animation showing the growth of high frequency trading. On my list too is Sal Arnuk’s Broken Markets.

Read more at The Enlightened Economist.

While Pearlstein clearly sees these backroom meetings of corporate chieftains in positive terms (he refers to them as “grown-ups” who have been noticeably absent from the conversation about the budget), the rest of us might view this plotting a bit differently. As Pearlstein openly acknowledges, this corporate coup is an end-run around the electorate. As corrupt as the political process may have become, at least we will get a vote in the election. Pearlstein’s plotters are not inviting the rest of us into the conversation.

Many of the same folks who brought the economy to ruin just a few years ago are now going to come up with a plan that is supposed to set the budget and the economy on a forward path. At the center of their proposal are big cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Read more at OpEdNews.

Examiners look at spreadsheets, but so do supervisors.  Spreadsheets are easy to look at in the home office.  Examiners’ add the greatest value when they talk to bankers of all levels, examine non-computerized documents, particularly loan and investment files, and inspect the real estate securing loans.  Examiners evaluate managers’ candor, competence, and credibility.  They develop expertise about markets, particularly for real estate.  They ask tough questions, documents the answers, and challenge the answers by asking the vital follow-up questions and demanding supporting documentation.

The idea that a Federal Reserve Governor who came from a non-regulatory background, is unlikely to have ever been part of an examination, and rarely works with examiners is the expert on conducting examinations should be facially preposterous.  I will explain why when you know where Tarullo was getting his advice about examinations it is even more preposterous.  The premise that stress tests have been shown to be “success[ful]” is delusional.  The following entities failed catastrophically shortly after passing stress tests with flying colors:  Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Lehman, AIG, the Big 3 Icelandic banks, and a series of Spanish banks.  Fannie and Freddie described their stress test as being so extreme that they represented a “nuclear winter” scenario.  The European stress tests deliberately excluded the banks’ exposure to sovereign risk – their greatest risk.  The U.S. stress tests were a pure propaganda exercise designed to mislead the public.  They ignored the banks’ massive unrecognized losses – their greatest risk.  The Fed allowed our largest banks to conduct their own stress tests.  We were all shocked to find that the banks passed their own tests. My students are jealous.

Read more at TheRealNews.com.

Any solution to today’s problems requires addressing the economy’s underlying weakness: a deficiency in aggregate demand. Firms won’t invest if there is no demand for their products. And one of the key reasons for lack of demand is America’s level of inequality — the highest in the advanced countries.

Because those at the top spend a much smaller portion of their income than those in the bottom and middle, when money moves from the bottom and middle to the top (as has been happening in America in the last dozen years), demand drops. The best way to promote employment today and sustained economic growth for the future, therefore, is to focus on the underlying problem of inequality. And this better economic performance in turn will generate more tax revenue, improving the country’s fiscal position.

Even supply-side economists, who emphasize the importance of increasing productivity, should understand the benefits of attacking inequality. America’s inequality does not come solely from market forces; those are at play in all advanced countries. Rather, much of the growth of income and wealth at the top in recent decades has come from what economists call rent-seeking — activities directed more at increasing the share of the pie they get rather than increasing the size of the pie itself.

Read more at the Los Angeles Times.

The recommendations accurately summarized the problems with procedures surrounding the construction of Libor – the most important reference interest rate in the world – and proposed some sensible alternative approaches.

Read more at New York Times.