David Beckworth is a Senior Research Fellow with the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a former international economist at the US Department of the Treasury. He is the author of Boom and Bust Banking: The Causes and Cures of the Great Recession and formerly taught at Western Kentucky University. His research focuses on monetary policy, and his work has been cited by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Economist. He has advised congressional staffers on monetary policy and has written for Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily, the New Republic, the Atlantic, and National Review.

Scott Burns is a Mercatus Dissertation Fellow studying monetary and development economics at George Mason University. He can be reached at [email protected]

Nicolás is Assistant Professor of Economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and a fellow of the Atlas Network’s Sound Money Project. His field of research is macroeconomics and monetary economics. His research has been published in outlets like The Review of Austrian Economics, The Independent Review, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, and The Journal of the History of Economic Thought among others. He co-authored with Adrian Ravier “A Proposal of Monetary Reform for Argentina: Flexible Dollarization and Free Banking.” He holds an economics degree from Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, a Master in Economics and Political Sciences from ESEADE and a Ph.D. in economics from Suffolk University.

Mark A. Calabria was director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute. Before joining Cato in 2009, he spent six years as a member of the senior professional staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. In that position, Calabria handled issues related to housing, mortgage finance, economics, banking and insurance for Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL). Prior to his service on Capitol Hill, Calabria served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Regulatory Affairs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and also held a variety of positions at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors. Calabria has also been a Research Associate with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies. He has extensive experience evaluating the impacts of legislative and regulatory proposals on financial and real estate markets, with particular emphasis on how policy changes in Washington affect low and moderate income households. He holds a doctorate in economics from George Mason University.

Kevin Dowd is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a professor of finance and economics at Durham University in England. Dowd has written extensively on the history and theory of free banking/private money, central banking, financial regulation, and commodity monetary systems. His books include Private Money: The Path to Monetary Stability, The State and the Monetary System, Laissez-Faire Banking, Competition and Finance: A New Interpretation of Financial and Monetary Economics, and Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking. and New Private Monies – A Bit Part Player? He is the author of a highly regarded finance text Measuring Market Risk, and in recent years has done work on financial risk management, pensions, and mortality modeling. He is also the co-author with Martin Hutchinson of Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System (Wiley, 2010). Dowd, and also has affiliations with the Cobden Centre, Institute of Economic Affairs, Independent Institute, and Instituto Bruno Leoni.

Dowd holds a PhD in economics from Sheffield University.