Austan Goolsbee

Austan Goolsbee is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and the youngest member of the cabinet of President Barack Obama. Goolsbee is also serving as staff director and chief economist on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Goolsbee was the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was an economic adviser to Barack Obama's 2004 Senate race before becoming a senior economic adviser to Senator Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign.

He is a member of the panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He is a Senior Economist to the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He was recently a Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

His work focuses on the new economy, government policy, taxes, and technology.

Goolsbee was selected as one of Financial Times' six "'Gurus of the Future'/Best Under 40" (2005), named one of the Young Global Leaders at the 2005 World Economic Forum, and one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow at the 2002 World Economic Forum.

He was born on August 18, 1969, in Waco, Texas. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in economics from Yale University in 1991, his M.A. in economics from Yale University in 1991, and his Ph.D in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995.

Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan was from 1987 to 2006 the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States. He currently works as a private advisor, making speeches and providing consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC.

John Micklethwait

John Micklethwait is Editor-in-Chief of The Economist. Before that he edited the US section of the newspaper (1999 - 2006) and ran the New York Bureau for two years, having edited the Business Section of the newspaper for the previous four years. His other roles have included setting up The Economist's office in Los Angeles, where he worked from 1990 - 1993 and being Media Correspondent.

He has covered business and politics from the United States, Latin America, Continental Europe, Southern Africa and most of Asia. He is a frequent broadcaster and has appeared on CNN, ABC News, BBC, Start the Week and NPR. He is the co-author of The Witch Doctors, A Future Perfect: the Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea and The Right Nation, a study of conservatism in America, with Adrian Wooldridge, also an Economist journalist.

Axel Weber

A German economist, Axel Weber is the president of the Deutsche Bundesbank and member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank responsible for the Communication Department and the Economics and Research Centre of the Deutschebank. He studied economics and public administration at the University of Konstanz from 1976 to 1982, graduating with a teaching diploma.

From 1982 to 1988, Dr. Weber worked as research assistant in the field of monetary economics at the University of Siegen and was awarded his doctorate in 1987. In 1994, having passed his habilitation qualification, he went on to teach at the University of Bonn. In 1998, Dr. Weber taught at the JW Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main where he remains a member of the Advisors' Board.

From 1998 to 2002, he was the director of the Centre for Financial Studies in Frankfurt am Main where he later moved on to teach at the University of Cologne, concurrently serving as a board member of the German Council of Economic Experts. In October 2002, Dr. Weber was a member of the expert advisory panel to the Deutsche Bundesbank and was later appointed to his current position in 2004.