Advisory Board

Timothy F. Geithner was the 75th Secretary of the Treasury for the first term of President Barack Obama’s administration. He was a principal architect of the president's successful strategy to avert economic collapse and to reform the financial system.

Between 2003 and 2009, Mr. Geithner served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He first joined the Treasury Department as a civil servant in 1988 and held a number of positions in three administrations, including Undersecretary for International Affairs under Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.

Mr. Geithner is the author of STRESS TEST: Reflections on Financial Crises. He chairs the Program on Financial Stability at the Yale University School of Management, where he is also a visiting lecturer. He is Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a member of the Group of Thirty. Mr. Geithner is currently President of Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm.

Dr. Zeti served as Governor of Bank Negara Malaysia from May 2000 until April 2016. In her career at the central bank, she had an important role in successfully managing the repair and resolution of the financial system during the Asian financial crisis and the consequent strong recovery of the economy in Malaysia. In the decade that followed, she also had an important role in the financial reform and transformation of the Malaysian financial system including overseeing the enactment of ten new major pieces of legislation for the financial sector. This period also saw the progressive liberalisation of the Malaysian financial system.

In the Asian region, Dr. Zeti was actively involved in strengthening cooperation and regional financial integration. In 2006, she chaired the regional task force that prepared the report for the future direction of central bank financial cooperation in the East Asian region. An important voice for the emerging world she was a founding member of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Asian Consultative Council, and was also the first co-chair of the Financial Stability Board Regional Consultative Group for Asia. She was the Chair of the BIS Central Bank Governance Group. Dr. Zeti also had an extensive role in the global development of Islamic finance.  She was also active in the global financial inclusion agenda. She is currently the Co-chair Board of Governors of Asia School of Business, established in collaboration with MIT Sloan.

Dr. Zeti received her PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ben S. Bernanke is a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and also serves as a Senior Advisor to PIMCO and Citadel. From February 2006 through January 2014, he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Dr. Bernanke also served as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policymaking body. He is also the author of  The Courage to Act.

Before his appointment as Chairman, Dr. Bernanke was Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, from June 2005 to January 2006. He had already served the Federal Reserve System in several roles. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002 to 2005; a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia (1987-89), Boston (1989-90), and New York (1990-91, 1994-96); and a member of the Academic Advisory Panel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1990-2002).

From 1994 to 1996, Dr. Bernanke was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He was the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and Chair of the Economics Department at the university from 1996 to 2002. Dr. Bernanke had been a Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton since 1985.

Before arriving at Princeton, Dr. Bernanke was an Associate Professor of Economics (1983-85) and an Assistant Professor of Economics (1979-83) at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His teaching career also included serving as a Visiting Professor of Economics at New York University (1993) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1989-90).

Dr. Bernanke has published many articles on a wide variety of economic issues, including monetary policy and macroeconomics, and he is the author of several scholarly books and two textbooks. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Bernanke served as the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as a member of the NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee. In July 2001, he was appointed Editor of the American Economic Review. Dr. Bernanke's work with civic and professional groups includes having served two terms as a member of the Montgomery Township (N.J.) Board of Education.

Dr. Bernanke was born in December 1953 in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina. He received a B.A. in economics in 1975 from Harvard University (summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in economics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Bernanke is married and has two children.

Bob Bruner is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the Darden Graduate Business School, and a research affiliate at the University of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs.  He has also held visiting appointments at Harvard and Columbia Universities in the United States, and at INSEAD in France, and IESE in Spain.  His publications include numerous books and articles, across a wide range of topics in finance and management including corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and financial distress.  His recent work focuses on financial crises and includes the book, The Panic of 1907: Heralding a New Era in Finance, Capitalism, and Democracy (2023).  His teaching has been recognized by various publications and by the highest awards from the University of Virginia and the Commonwealth of Virginia.   A faculty member at the Darden School since 1982, he served as its Dean from 2005 to 2015.  In 2012, Poets & Quants and CNNMoney/ Fortune named him "Dean of the Year."  He has advised corporate executives and government officials and served on the boards of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.  Bruner received the Doctor of Business Administration degree with a concentration in finance from Harvard University in 1982, the MBA from Harvard in 1974, and the Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science from Yale University in 1971.  

Agustín Carstens was born June 9, 1958 in Mexico City. He holds a M.A. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in economics from the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. in economics (summa cum laude) from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in 1982.

Dr. Carstens began his professional career in 1980 at Banco de México, where he held many positions at the central bank’s International Department, Economic Research Department, and at the Office of the Governor.

From 1999 to 2000 he was appointed executive director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), representing the casting votes of Spain, Mexico, Central America, and Venezuela within the organization.

He served as deputy finance minister in Mexico from 2000 to 2003.

In August 2003 he was appointed deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund and was responsible for handling the IMF’s relationship with more than 70 member countries.

On December 1, 2006, President Felipe Calderón appointed him minister of Finance, a position he held until December 9, 2009. While serving as minister of Finance, Dr. Carstens also chaired the IMF and World Bank Joint Development Committee from March 2007 to October 2009.

On December 9, 2009 he was proposed by President Calderón as governor of Banco de México. After the Senate ratified the president’s proposal on December 28, he was appointed governor for a 6-year term, from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2015.

Dr. Carstens has been a member of the Steering Committee of the G-20 Financial Stability Board (FSB) since early 2010.

On January 10, 2011, the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) elected him as a board member.

In September 2011, he was named Central Bank Governor of the Americas for the Year 2011 by Emerging Markets magazine.

On that same year, he received the Bravo Award 2011 by Latin Trade magazine, in Miami, Florida.

In 2012, The Banker named him Best Central Bank Governor of the Year 2012.

From April 2013 to March 2015 he served as chairman of the FSB Standing Committee on Assessment of Vulnerabilities (SCAV). The SCAV is responsible for monitoring and assessing vulnerabilities affecting the global financial system and proposing to the FSB actions needed to address them.

Since July 1, 2013 he is chairman of the Economic Consultative Council (ECC) and the Global Economy Meeting (GEM) at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), both in charge of setting and carrying out effective coordination and cooperation activities among central banks, in favor of global monetary and financial stability.

On Feb. 20, 2015 he was selected by the members of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the policy advisory committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as Chairman of the Committee for a term of three years, effective March 23, 2015.

The IMFC is the main advisory body of the IMF Board of Governors and deliberates on the IMF’s key policy issues. It is made up of 24 members (reflecting the composition of the IMF Executive Board), among which are finance ministers and central bank governors.

As of December 1st, 2017 he will become General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Stijn Claessens represents the BIS externally in senior groups, including the Financial Stability Board, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the G20. Within the BIS, he leads policy-based analyses of financial sector issues and oversees the work of the Committee on the Global Financial System and other committee secretariats. Between 1987 and 2006, he worked at the World Bank in various positions. From 2007 to 2014, he was Assistant Director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. From 2015 to early 2017, he was Senior Adviser in the Division of International Finance of the Federal Reserve Board. He holds a PhD in business economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He taught at the New York University business school and the University of Amsterdam.

Anthony J. Dowd is a Special Assistant in the office of Paul A. Volcker, and served under Mr. Volcker when he was Chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board starting in February 2009. He is also a director of Future Pipe Industries, Ltd. (Dubai, UAE) and a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council. From 1992 to 2008, Mr. Dowd was a General Partner of Charter Oak Capital, a private equity fund.  Prior to Charter Oak, he was an investment banker with James D. Wolfensohn, Inc. in New York.  From 1981 to 1986, Mr. Dowd served as an officer in the United States Army in the First Cavalry Division. Mr. Dowd graduated with distinction from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1981 with a BS in Engineering.  He received an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1988.

Mr. Arminio Fraga is the founding partner at Gavea Investimentos, an investment management firm he founded in August, 2003, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Mr.  Fraga was the Chairman of the Board, BM&F Bovespa, Brazil’s securities, commodities and derivatives exchange, from April 2009 to April 2013, and was the President of the Central Bank of Brazil from March 1999 to December 2002.  

 From 1993 until his appointment as Governor of the Central Bank, he was Managing Director of Soros Fund Management in New York.  From 1991 to 1992, he was the Director responsible for international affairs at the Central Bank of Brazil.   Earlier in his career, he held positions with Salomon Brothers and Garantia Investment Bank.

Mr.  Fraga has taught at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, the Graduate School of Economics at Getulio Vargas Foundation, the School of International Affairs at Columbia University and the Wharton School.

He is a member of the Group of Thirty and of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the boards of several NGOs.   Mr. Fraga has published widely in the areas of international finance, macroeconomics, and monetary policy.

Mr.  Fraga earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 1985, and his BA/MA in Economics from the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in 1981.

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Professor in Economics, the College, and the Harris School, as well as the Director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Energy & Environment Lab at the University of Chicago Urban Labs. He previously served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and is a former member of the Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board. Greenstone also directed the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, which studies policies to promote economic growth, and has since joined its Advisory Council. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and an editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Before coming to Chicago, Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT.

https://fnce.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/herring/

Paulson served as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush, from July 2006 to January 2009. Prior to that, he had a thirty-two year career at Goldman Sachs, serving as chairman and chief executive officer beginning in 1999. Earlier in his career, he was a member of the White House Domestic Council as well as a staff assistant at the Pentagon.

Today, he serves as chairman of the Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago, which aims to advance sustainable economic growth, a cleaner environment and cross-border investments in the United States and China. A “think and do” tank founded in 2011, the Institute’s work is comprised of programs, advocacy and research with partners around the globe.

A lifelong conservationist, Paulson was Chairman of The Nature Conservancy Board of Directors and, prior to that, founded and co-chaired the organization’s Asia-Pacific Council. In 2011, he founded and continues to co-chair the Latin American Conservation Council, comprised of global business and political leaders.

Paulson co-chairs the Risky Business Project, which focuses on quantifying and publicizing the economic risks of climate change in the United States, with former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. The non-partisan initiative aims to spur action to mitigate the effects of climate change before the worst potential outcomes occur.

In his best-selling book, On the Brink, Paulson describes his experiences as Treasury Secretary fending off the near-collapse of the U.S. economy during the Great Recession. His new book, Dealing with China, details his career working with scores of China’s top political and business leaders and witnessing the evolution of China’s state-controlled capitalism.

Paulson graduated from Dartmouth College in 1968 and received an M.B.A. from Harvard University in 1970. He and his wife, Wendy, have two children and four grandchildren.

Kenneth Rogoff is Thomas D. Cabot Professor at Harvard University.  From 2001-2003, Rogoff served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund.   His 2009 book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time is Different:  Eight Centuries of Financial Folly has been very widely cited by academics, policymakers and journalists.  One regularity that Reinhart and Rogoff illustrate is the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the run-up and the aftermath of severe financial crises. In general, they show that for financial crises, the differences between emerging markets and advanced countries are far less pronounced than previously believed.  Rogoff is also known for his seminal work on exchange rates and on central bank independence.   His treatise Foundations of International Macroeconomics (joint with Maurice Obstfeld) is the standard graduate text in the field worldwide.  His new book, The Curse of Cash (September 2016) argues the case for phasing out large denomination paper currency (but not going cashless) and why this would help fight crime and tax evasion while enabling monetary policy to be more effective in deep recessions.. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries.

Rogoff is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Group of Thirty, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  Rogoff is among the top ten on RePec’s  ranking of economists by scholarly citations. He is also an international grandmaster of chess.

For more on Professor Rogoff’s research, opinion pieces, and bio, see http://scholar.harvard.edu/rogoff.

Roberta Romano is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law. Her research has focused on state competition for corporate charters, the political economy of takeover regulation, shareholder litigation, institutional investor activism in corporate governance and the regulation of securities markets and financial instruments and institutions. Professor Romano is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Corporate Governance Institute, a research associate of the National Bureau for Economic Research, a past President of the American Law and Economics Association and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, and a past co-editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. She has received the Yale Law Women teaching award three times and is the author of The Genius of American Corporate Law (1993) and The Advantage of Competitive Federalism for Securities Regulation (2002), and series editor of the Foundations of Law reader series and editor of the volume in the series, Foundations of Corporate Law, 2d ed. (2010). 

David Scharfstein is the Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Finance and Banking at Harvard Business School, where he is also Faculty Chair of Doctoral Programs.  Scharfstein has published on a broad range of topics in finance, including corporate investment and financing behavior, risk management, financial distress, capital allocation, and venture capital.  His current research focuses on financial intermediation and financial regulation, including research on housing finance, financial system risk, bank lending and funding, and the growth of the financial sector.  Scharfstein is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and currently the President of the American Finance Association.  In 2009-2010, he was Senior Advisor to the U.S. Treasury Secretary, working on policy related to the financial crisis. He previously was a member of the Financial Advisory Roundtable of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  From 1987- 2003 he was a finance professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Scharfstein received a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1986 and an A.B. from Princeton University in 1982.

DPM Tharman Shanmugaratnam is Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies in the Singapore Cabinet. He is also Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator.

Tharman is Chairman of the Group of Thirty, an independent global council of leading economic and financial policy thinkers, having succeeded Jean-Claude Trichet in Jan 2017. He was previously appointed by his international peers as Chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the key policy forum of the IMF, for an extended period of four years from 2011, and was its first Asian chair.

He has spent his career in public service, in roles related to economic policy and education. He served as Minister for Finance for eight years, over 2007- 2015, and as Minister for Education for five years, over 2003-2008. Among his broad responsibilities in Singapore, he leads the Council for Skills, Innovation and Productivity (CSIP). One of its key programmes aims to develop the skills of the future and promote the practice of lifelong learning (‘SkillsFuture’).

Tharman studied at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. He later obtained a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard University, where he was named a Lucius N Littauer Fellow in recognition of outstanding potential.

Masaaki Shirakawa was previously Governor of the Bank of Japan. He was appointed as Governor in April, 2008 and left the Bank in March 2013. He was also Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the BIS since January 2011. Currently, he is professor at Aoyama-Gakuin University. He joined the Bank in 1972 and held key positions, including Executive Director in charge of monetary policy. Born in 1949, he studied economics at the University of Tokyo (B.A.) and at the University of Chicago (M.A.).  He assumed Professorship at the Kyoto University School of Government from July 2006 to March 2008.

Daniel K. Tarullo is a Professor of International Financial Regulatory Practice at Harvard Law School. He returned to full-time teaching in January 2018 following more than eight years as a member of the Federal Reserve Board, from January 2009 to April 2017.  He retains his appointment as a Professor of Law at Georgetown and is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.

As oversight governor for supervision and regulation, he led the Federal Reserve’s financial regulatory reforms, including implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act, and revamped the Federal Reserve’s approach to the supervision of systemically important financial institutions.  He was the Federal Reserve’s representative to the international Financial Stability Board, including four years as chair of its Committee on Supervision and Regulation.  From 2015 to 2017 he was also Chair of the interagency Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.  

Professor Tarullo had extensive government and academic experience prior to his nomination to the Federal Reserve.  From 1993 to 1998, he served, successively, as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business affairs, Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy. He was a principal on both the National Economic Council and the National Security Council, as well as President Clinton’s personal representative (sherpa) to the G7 group of industrialized nations. 
Between periods of government service, Professor Tarullo taught for fifteen years at Georgetown and Harvard.  He was also a visiting professor at Princeton and the University of Basel.

Sir Paul Tucker is chair of the Systemic Risk Council, and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, he was Deputy Governor at the Bank of England, sitting on its monetary policy, financial stability, and prudential policy committees. Internationally, he was a member of the G20 Financial Stability Board, leading its work on too big to fail; a director of the Bank for International Settlements, and chair of its Committee for Payment and Settlement Systems. His other activities include being a director at Swiss Re, a senior fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies, a Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College Oxford, and a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation.