Alex Pollock

Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.  He has been the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury; a distinguished senior fellow at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC; a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.  Mr. Pollock focuses on financial policy issues, including financial cycles, housing finance, banking, central banking, uncertainty and risk, retirement finance, corporate governance, and financial crises. 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 (2022), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony. He has served as a director of CME Group and of Ascendium Education Group, 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. His work is available at alexjpollock.com.

Episode Appearances

Episode 221: Are We Really Surprised We’re Having Another Banking Crisis?-Alex Pollock & Steve Dewey

04/05/2023

Guest(s): Alex Pollock

Joining me to talk all this through are Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey. Both are grizzled veterans of the banking and regulatory world, which, as Alex points out, has been hit by a major crisis every decade since the 1970s. Together we have many decades of experience in financial markets. Alex and I have been conversing with each other, and interrupting each other, for almost fifty years.

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Episode 41: Financial Busts: Why Are We Always Surprised with Alex Pollock

11/01/2018

Guest(s): Alex Pollock

People look to the government to prevent future financial crises and too many trust that politicians and economic experts can create policies to protect us and our 401(k) plans. We shouldn’t rely on them. These experts are smart, mostly well-intentioned people but they can’t prevent the next crisis. No one can. Why is that? And why is a future crisis inevitable? I discuss these and many other questions with “Finance and Philosophy” author Alex Pollock.

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