Expertise
Antitrust; banking; financial institutions; internet policy; trade policy
Background
Past Positions
Former director of the Brookings Economic Studies Department (1996-2003);Associate Director, Office of Management and Budget (1995-96);Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice (1993-95);Partner, Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy;Visiting Lecturer in Banking Law, Yale Law School;Staff Member, President's Council of Economic Advisers (1977-79);Member, Presidential-Congressional Commission on the Causes of the Savings and Loan Crisis;Consultant, U.S. Treasury Department
Education
Ph.D. (1987), J.D. (1977), M.Phil. (1976), Yale University;B.S., Wharton School of Finance, University of Pennsylvania, 1972
"We allow people to buy homes with virtually no money down, and often without any verification of income. That’s massive leverage at the mortgage origination stage. If that were all that were true we would have just had a major mortgage crisis and that would have been it. But in fact we’ve had this catastrophe that we are all living through, so the question is why did that bubble, when it burst, reverberate through the rest of the system, and the answer is that the rest of the system was leveraged."