Alumni Author Book Talk: Howard B. Adler, A&S '72

Howard B. Adler is an attorney and former government official. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, where his job was to monitor and remediate threats to the financial stability of the United States. The Secretary of the Treasury awarded him the Treasury Distinguished Service Award for his work. For over 30 years, he was a partner at the law firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, LLP, where he was cohead of the firm’s corporate transactional practice. He received numerous professional accolades as a lawyer, including recognition by Chambers USA: America’s Leading Business Lawyers as a Senior Statesman  and Tier 1 mergers and acquisitions and private equity lawyer in Washington, D.C.; Best Lawyers in America for securities law and mergers and acquisitions; and Super Lawyers for mergers and acquisitions and securities/ capital markets law. Prior to Gibson Dunn, he was Executive Vice President and General Counsel of The Riggs National Bank of Washington, D.C. Mr. Adler received his B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. from New York University School of Law, where he was Note and Comment Editor of the Law Review. Mr. Adler has served as a member of the Board of Governing Trustees of American Ballet Theatre, Treasurer of the Washington D.C. Bar and Secretary of the Johns Hopkins Alumni Council.

Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.  He was the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury 2019-2021; a distinguished senior fellow at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC 2015-2019, 2021; a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute 2004-2015; President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago 1991-2004; and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 1991.  Mr. Pollock focuses on financial policy issues, including financial cycles, government-sponsored enterprises, housing finance, banking, central banking, uncertainty and risk, retirement finance, corporate governance, and financial crises with their political responses. He is the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018), of Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), and co-author of Surprised Again!—The Covid Crisis and the New Market Bubble, as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony. He previously served as a director of CME Group 2004-2019, and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019, and continues as a director of the Great Books Foundation, where he was Chairman of the Board 2006-2014. Mr. Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. He and his wife, Anne, live in Lake Forest, Illinois.