Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee

The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (SFRC) is a group of publicly recognized independent experts on the financial services industry — including experts in banking, insurance, and securities — who meet regularly to study and critique regulatory policies affecting this sector of the economy.

During closed sessions before the luncheon, committee members will discuss a variety of current financial-regulation issues: the Federal Reserve’s Basel III-related rules, housing policy, municipal bankruptcy, and testing for equivalence of US and foreign regulatory systems. In a briefing following the sessions, SFRC members will present the adopted policy statements and answer related questions.

Speaker Biographies

Marshall Blume is the Howard Butcher III Professor Emeritus of Financial Management and the director emeritus of the Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has worked since 1967. He researches financial markets, investments, investment behavior, and fixed-income securities. Blume is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Journal of Fixed Income. He is on the board of the Measey Foundation and is an independent director of various CPA real-estate investment trusts.

Kenneth W. Dam is the Max Pam Professor Emeritus of American and Foreign Law and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He served as deputy secretary in the US Department of the Treasury from 2001 to 2003 and at the US Department of State from 1982 to 1985. Previously, he was the executive director of the Council on Economic Policy and assistant director for national security and international policy at the Office of Management and Budget. Dam’s work in the private sector includes serving as IBM’s vice president for law and external relations and as president and CEO of the United Way of America. He is an honorary member of the board of the Brookings Institution and serves as a nonresident senior fellow of that organization. Dam is also a board member of the Committee for Economic Development and was formerly chairman of the German-American Academic Council. He has been a board member of numerous nonprofit institutions and served for 13 years on the board of Alcoa.

Franklin Edwards is professor emeritus and former Arthur F. Burns Chair of Free and Competitive Enterprise in finance and economics at the Columbia Business School. He has been a visiting scholar at AEI and senior economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. His areas of expertise include financial markets and the regulation of financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate governance, and derivatives markets. Edwards is the author of “The New Finance: Regulation and Financial Stability” (AEI Press, 1996) and the textbook “Futures and Options,” (McGraw-Hill College, 1992). Edwards has authored more than 100 scholarly articles.

Robert A. Eisenbeis is the vice chairman and chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisors, where he advises the company’s asset managers on US economic and financial market developments and their implications for investment and trading strategies. Eisenbeis was formerly executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where he advised the bank’s president on monetary policy for Federal Open Market Committee deliberations and was in charge of basic research and policy analysis. Previously, he was the Wachovia Professor of Banking at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also held senior positions at the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Eisenbeis is a member of the Financial Economists Roundtable and a fellow of the National Association of Business Economics.

Richard J. Herring is cochair of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. He is also the Jacob Safra Professor of International Banking and codirector of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has worked since 1972. He is likewise executive director of the Financial Economists Roundtable. His research areas include international banking, international finance, and money and banking. He has written more than 125 articles, monographs, and books and his research has been sponsored at various times by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and several different international organizations.

Edward Kane is a professor of finance at Boston College. From 1972 to 1992, he held the Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics at Ohio State University. Kane is a founding member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee and served for 12 years as a trustee and member of the finance committee of Teachers Insurance. He currently consults for the World Bank and is a senior fellow in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Center for Financial Research. Previously, Kane consulted for numerous agencies, including the International Monetary Fund, components of the Federal Reserve System, and three foreign central banks. He also consulted for the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Office of Technology Assessment of the US Congress. He is a past president and fellow of the American Finance Association and a former Guggenheim fellow. He also served as president of the International Atlantic Economic Society and the North American Economics and Finance Association. Kane is a longtime research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has authored three books and coauthored or coedited several more. Kane has published widely in professional journals and currently serves on seven editorial boards.

George G. Kaufman is the cochair of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. He is also the John Smith Professor of Finance and Economics at Loyola University Chicago, where he has taught since 1981. He previously taught at the University of Oregon and was a research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He was likewise a visiting professor at Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Southern California. He was a visitor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and at the Comptroller of the Currency, where he was acting director of research. He also served as a deputy to the assistant secretary of the US Department of the Treasury. Kaufman has published widely in leading professional journals and was a founding editor of both the Journal of Financial Services Research and Journal of Financial Stability. He has served as president of the Western Finance Association, the Midwest Finance Association, and the North American Economic and Finance Association; is president-elect of the Western Economic Association; and is a past director of the American Finance Association.

Kenneth E. Scott is the Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business emeritus at Stanford Law School. He is a leading scholar in the fields of corporate finance reform and corporate governance, and on federal deposit insurance issues and federal banking regulation. Also a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, he has recently written books on the financial crisis and bailout reforms. Scott has extensive consulting experience, including turns with the World Bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Resolution Trust Corporation, and the National Association of Securities Dealers (now FINRA). He is also a member of the Financial Economists Roundtable and the State Bar of California’s Financial Institutions Committee. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1968, Scott was general counsel to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and chief deputy savings and loan commissioner of California. He has practiced law in New York and Los Angeles.

Chester Spatt is the Kenneth B. and Pamela R. Dunn Professor of Finance at Carnegie Mellon, where he has taught since 1979. From 2004 to 2007, Spatt served as the chief economist and director of the Office of Economic Analysis for the US Securities and Exchange Commission. He has written extensively on financial regulation, market structure, taxation and asset allocation, pricing and valuation, and the impact of information in the marketplace. Additionally, he is a member of the Federal Reserve’s Model Validation Council, the Systemic Risk Council, and the Financial Economists Roundtable. He is also a fellow at the TIAA-CREF Institute. Spatt was a founder and the second executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies, is past president of both the Western Finance Association and Society for Financial Studies, and served as a member of the economic advisory board for NASDAQ from 2000 to 2002.

Peter J. Wallison holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies at AEI, where he codirects the program on financial market studies. He was also a cochair of the Pew Financial Reform Task Force and a member of the congressionally authorized Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Wallison previously practiced banking, corporate, and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Washington, DC. In 1986 and 1987, Wallison was White House counsel to former president Ronald Reagan. From 1981 to 1985, he was general counsel of the US Department of the Treasury, where he played a significant role in the development of the Reagan administration’s proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. He also served as general counsel to the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee and participated in the US Department of the Treasury’s efforts to deal with the debt held by less-developed countries. Between 1972 and 1976, Wallison was special assistant to former New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and, subsequently, counsel to Rockefeller when he was vice president of the US.