Carmen Reinhart

Carmen Reinhart was Senior Policy Advisor and Deputy Director at the International Monetary Fund and held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s. She serves in the Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and was a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisors. She has written on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international financeHer work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises in both advanced economies and emerging markets. Her best-selling book (with Kenneth S. Rogoff) entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly  documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history. It has been translated to over 20 languages and won the Paul A. Samuelson Award.

Based on publications and scholarly citations, Reinhart is ranked among the top economists worldwide, according to Research Papers in Economics (RePEc). She has testified before Congress and has been listed among Bloomberg Markets Most Influential 50 in Finance, Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Thompson Reuters' The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds. In 2018 she was awarded the King Juan Carlos Prize in Economics and NABE's Adam Smith Award, among others.

Simon Potter

Simon Potter was nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from September 2019 to June 2020, with a research focus on central bank operations, monetary policy, digital currencies, reference rates, the role of the dollar, and economic forecasting.

Prior to joining the Institute, he was head of the Markets Group and System Open Market Account (SOMA) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In this role, he oversaw the implementation of domestic open market and foreign exchange trading operations on behalf of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the execution of fiscal agent support for the US Treasury, the provision of account services to foreign and international monetary authorities, and the administration and production of reference interest rates for US money markets.

He started at the New York Fed in June 1998 and served as director of economic research and co-head of the Research and Statistics Group at the New York Fed, prior to becoming head of the Markets Group in June 2012 where he was responsible for monetary policy advice. He played a prominent role in the Federal Reserve’s financial stability efforts, including by contributing to the design of the 2009 US bank stress tests, as a member of the international Macroeconomic Assessment Group that supported the Basel Committee’s work to strengthen bank capital standards and, most recently, as chair of the Global Foreign Exchange Committee. In addition, he worked for the Financial Stability Oversight Council in 2011 to produce its first annual report.

Prior to working at the New York Fed, he was an assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles. He has also taught at Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and Princeton. His academic research focused on applying Bayesian methods to time series models.

Tomas Sedlacek

Tomas Sedlacek is a Czech economist and university lecturer. He is the Chief Macroeconomic Strategist at ČSOB, a former member of the National Economic Council of the Czech Republic and an economic advisor to former President Václav Havel.

Sedlacek is a member of Yale University World Fellowship, selected as one of “The Five Hot Minds in Economics” by Yale Economic Journal in 2006 and co-author of various case studies for Harvard and Georgetown. He is a lecturer and PhDr. graduate at Charles University in Prague, one of the oldest universities in Europe. In his recent book, The Economics of Good and Evil, (which became a number one bestseller in Switzerland and Germany after 2 weeks of its release) Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world.

He was an advisor on macroeconomic issues dealing with the general economic part of the Presidential responsibilities. The main areas of responsibility were affairs with the Czech National Bank, Securities and Exchange Commission, Ministry of Finance and EU related economic issues. Also he was a non-political advisor to the Minister of Finance, responsible for macroeconomic issues, fiscal consolidation, European affairs and communication with The World Bank. He participated at the first historical Czech Sovereign Eurobond Emission, and represented the country at the World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington DC.

Tomas is also a recognised specialist on fiscal policy, Euro and European affairs in the leading Czech bank CSOB, a unit of multinational financial group KBC. He is a regular weekly columnist of the top Czech business newspaper Hospodarske noviny since 2006 and a frequent commentator of public affairs and frequent panelist with over three hundred speeches since 2009.

Myron Scholes

Myron Scholes is a Canadian-American financial economist. In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a method to determine the value of derivatives.

Prof. Myron Scholes’ research has focused on taxation on asset prices and incentives. He studied the effects of the taxation of dividends on the prices of securities, the interaction of incentives and taxes in executive compensation, capital structure issues with taxation, and the effects of taxes on the optimal liquidation of assets. He wrote several articles on investment banking and incentives and developed a new theory of tax planning under uncertainty and information asymmetry which led to a book with Mark A. Wolfson called Taxes and Business Strategies: A Planning Approach (1991).

Prof. Myron Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-originator of the Black-Scholes options pricing model. Scholes serves as the Chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management and on the board of directors of Dimensional Fund Advisors. He was a principal and Limited Partner at Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. and a Managing Director at Salomon Brothers, where he was instrumental in building Salomon Swapco. Other positions Scholes held include the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Director of Center for Research in Security Prices, and Professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Scholes, as of 2014, was Chief Investment Strategist at Janus Capital Group.

Scholes earned his PhD at the University of Chicago.

 

Stephanie Flanders

Stephanie Hope Flanders (born 5 August 1968) is a British former broadcast journalist who was the BBC economics editor for five years. In November 2013 she left the BBC for a role as J.P. Morgan Asset Management's chief market strategist for Britain and Europe.

She is a former speech writer and senior advisor to US Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers in the Clinton Administration, where she was involved in the management of emerging market crises and other major economic issues from 1997 to 2001. She has also worked as a reporter for the New York Times, and as principal editor of the UN’s 2002 Human Development Report.

Before heading off to the US, Flanders was an editorial-writer and economics columnist at the FT, and an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and London Business School. She was educated at Balliol College, Oxford and Harvard University.

Flanders was named Political Journalist of the Year at the 2007 Women in Public Life Awards, and Broadcast Journalist of the Year at the 2005 Workworld Media Awards. She was elected to the governing council of the Royal Economic Society in 2007 and became a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford in 2008.