Archives: Team Members

AUSTAN GOOLSBEE  is president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. In this capacity, he serves on the Federal Open Market Committee—the Federal Reserve System’s monetary policymaking body—and leads the Chicago Fed, which conducts research and monitors local economic conditions in support of the formulation of monetary policy, supervises and regulates banking organizations, and provides financial services to banks and similar institutions, as well as to the U.S. government.

Prior to becoming president of the Chicago Fed in January 2023, Goolsbee served as the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where he first joined the faculty in 1995. He is known for his empirical research on many different industries and on economic policy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

Goolsbee served as a member and then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 through 2011 and was a member of the President’s cabinet. He has also served on the Board of Education for the City of Chicago, the Economic Advisory Panel to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Census Advisory Committee, the Digital Economy Board of Advisors to the Commerce Department, and the External Advisory Group on Digital Technology for the
International Monetary Fund.

Goolsbee has a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA and MA in economics from Yale University. He is married and has three children.

TIMOTHY F. GEITHNER is currently chairman of Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm. Mr. Geithner was the 75th Secretary of the Treasury for the first term of President Barack Obama’s administration. 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 chair of the Program on Financial Stability at the Yale University School of Management, where he is also a visiting lecturer. He is co-chair of the board of directors of the International Rescue Committee. He is also the co-chair of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. 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 the author of “Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.” He also co-authored “Firefighting” and co-edited “First Responders” with Ben S. Bernanke and Henry M. Paulson, Jr. Mr. Geithner holds a BA in government and Asian studies from Dartmouth College and an MA in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

JASON FURMAN is the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy jointly at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He is also nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Furman engages in public policy through research, writing and teaching in a wide range of areas including U.S. and international macroeconomics, fiscal policy, labor markets and competition policy. He co-teaches Ec10 “Principles of Economics,” the largest course at Harvard University. Previously Furman served eight years as a top economic adviser to President Obama, including serving as the 28th Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from August 2013 to January 2017, acting as both President Obama’s chief economist and a member of the cabinet. During this time Furman played a major role in most of the major economic policies of the Obama Administration. Furman also served under President Clinton. Furman is a member of numerous organizations including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Group of Thirty and the Economic Strategy Group. He also serves as a Trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and on the advisory boards for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the Bund Summit, the Hamilton Project and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. In addition to articles in scholarly journals and periodicals, Furman is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Project Syndicate and the editor of two books on economic policy. Furman holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Laurence D. Fink is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock. He and seven partners founded BlackRock in 1988, and under his leadership, the firm has grown into a global leader in investment and technology solutions. BlackRock’s mission is to help our clients build better financial futures and the firm is trusted to manage more money than any other investment company in the world.  

Prior to founding BlackRock in 1988, Mr. Fink was a member of the Management Committee and a Managing Director of The First Boston Corporation.  

He serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of New York University (NYU) and the World Economic Forum, and is Co-Chairman of the NYU Langone Medical Center Board of Trustees. In addition, he serves on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art, the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Rescue Committee. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management in Beijing and on the Executive Committee of the Partnership for New York City.  

Mr. Fink earned an MBA from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1976 and a BA from UCLA in 1974.  

ERSKINE B. BOWLES began his business career at Morgan Stanley and went on to found and lead Bowles, Hollowell, Conner, which became the preeminent investment bank focused on middle market mergers and acquisitions. He subsequently co-founded the middle market private equity firm Carousel Capital, served as a senior advisor for Credit Suisse First Boston, was a partner with the global buyout firm Forstmann Little & Co. and the chairman of the board of advisors of BDT Capital Partners. He previously served on the boards of Morgan Stanley (Lead Director), First Union Corporation, Merck, VF, Cousins Properties (Lead Director), Norfolk Southern Corporation, General Motors, Belk and Facebook. In his public sector career, Erskine served in the Clinton Administration as SBA Administrator, Deputy White House chief of staff, and chief of staff. During his time in the White House, he negotiated the first balanced budget in a generation. Erskine co-chaired with Senator Alan Simpson the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and from 2005-2011, he served as the president of the University of North Carolina. With Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Erskine founded the Aspen Economic Strategy Group and he was co-chair from 2017-2021.

HANK PAULSON is the founder and chairman of the Paulson Institute, which aims to foster a US-China relationship that maintains global order in a rapidly evolving world. He is executive chairman of TPG Rise Climate, the climate investing platform of the global private equity firm TPG. Paulson is also the co-chair of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, and co-chair of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum Advisory Board. 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. 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 the Latin American Conservation Council, comprised of global business and political leaders, which he co-chaired until 2017. He also co-chaired the Risky Business Project from 2013-2017, a non-partisan initiative that quantified and publicized the economic risks of climate change in the United States. Earlier in his career, he was a member of the White House Domestic Council as well as a staff assistant at the Pentagon. Paulson is the author of the bestsellers On the Brink and Dealing with China. He is also the co-author of two books with Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, “First Responders” and “Firefighting.” He graduated from Dartmouth College and received an M.B.A. from Harvard University.