Join the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) for a lunchtime discussion on how legislators can help create a free, open, and secure environment for innovation in digital currency. Looking to learn more about Stablecoins, anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulations, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), or the SEC's treatment of cryptocurrency? This briefing is for you. A BBQ luncheon will be served.

Meet our panelists:

Dr. Thomas Hogan:

Thomas L. Hogan, Ph.D. is a senior research fellow at AIER. He was formerly the chief economist for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. He has also worked at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Troy University, West Texas A&M University, the Cato Institute, the World Bank, Merrill Lynch’s commodity trading group and for investment firms in the U.S. and Europe. Dr. Hogan’s research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Macroeconomics and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. He has appeared on programs such as BBC World News, Stossel TV, and Bloomberg Radio and has been quoted by news outlets including CNN Business, American Banker, and the National Review.

Caitlin Long:

Caitlin Long is Founder & CEO of Custodia Bank. A 22-year Wall Street veteran, Ms. Long became involved with Bitcoin in 2012. She was a managing director who ran Morgan Stanley’s pension solutions business in New York (2007-16), held senior roles at Credit Suisse (1997-2007) and began her career at Salomon Brothers (1994-97). From 2016-18 she jointly spearheaded a blockchain project for delivering market index data to Vanguard as chairman and president of Symbiont, an enterprise blockchain start-up. In 2017, after a flaw in a Wyoming law blocked her from donating appreciated bitcoin to endow a scholarship for female engineers at the University of Wyoming, she volunteered to help fix the statute. That led to her helping spearhead a multi-year initiative to make Wyoming, her native state, an oasis for blockchain companies in the US, where Wyoming has enacted 33 blockchain-enabling laws since 2018. Two Wyoming governors have appointed her to serve on the Wyoming Legislature's Blockchain Task Force / Blockchain Select Committee.

J.W. Verret:

Associate Professor J.W. Verret, JD, CPA/CFF, CFE, CVA, joined the law faculty of the Antonin Scalia Law School in 2008 and teaches Banking, Securities and Corporation Law as well as Forensic Accounting and Finance for Lawyers. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School. His work teaching CLEs on law and forensic accounting at law firms around the country was profiled by Above the Law at this link: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/02/educating-associates-in-finance-and-accounting-and-offering-expert-witnesses-too. He frequently serves as an expert witness in securities, corporate and commercial litigation and arbitration proceedings on securities, M&A and forensic accounting matters. A few representative engagements include New Jersey v. Sprint, 758 F.Supp.2d 1186 (2010) and Landsdowne v. OpenBand, 713 F.3d 187 (2013), but most arbitration expert matters are subject to NDAs. These expert matters are handled via an expert witness firm Professor Verret founded, known as Veritas, Veritas Analytics, or Veritas Forensics. Prof. Verret was recently deemed a forensic accounting expert in a $300 million dollar federal money laundering case by Judge Moss in U.S. v. Sterlingov. He has served on the Investor Advisory Committee of the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he advised the Chairman of the SEC on legal and policy reform. He is currently a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s FASAC advisory committee on the development of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). He is faculty liaison to the American College of Business Court Judges. He has served as Independent Chairman of the Board of Directors of Egan-Jones Ratings, one of the eight domestic credit rating firms licensed by the SEC to provide credit ratings on the debt of public companies and provides recommendations on shareholder proxy votes. He previously clerked on the Delaware Court of Chancery. He received his JD from Harvard Law School, a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a BS in Financial Accounting from LSU. His work has appeared in venues from the Stanford Law Review and The Journal of Law and Economics to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He has appeared on most major television networks on financial regulatory issues and has testified before the U.S. House and Senate over a dozen times. He has previously served as Senior Counsel and Chief Economist for the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, where he led oversight of federal anti-money laundering law and oversight of the Treasury Department’s (particularly FinCen’s) evolving laws impacting crypto assets, and where he led an investigation into a leak of confidential information by the Federal Reserve that led to the resignation of the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. He is a licensed forensic accountant and holds the CPA, CFF (Certified in Financial Forensics), CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner), and CVA (Certified Valuation Analyst) licenses. He serves on the board of directors of the Zcash Foundation, which funds research into cryptocurrency privacy and leading cryptography innovations in the zero-knowledge proof school of cryptography mathematics utilized in crypto privacy tools. He holds a certificate in the economics of blockchain from the Wharton Business School.

Moderated by Grant McCarty:

Grant McCarty is Co-Executive Director of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. Before founding the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Grant served as the Executive Director of the Bitcoin Advocacy Project and the Co-Director of Policy and Public Affairs at Bitcoin Magazine. Prior to those roles, Grant was running his own marketing consulting firm and digital marketing agency. He also founded an education startup dedicated to reducing inequity in college admissions, he worked as the CMO for a fintech startup in Silicon Valley, and he was the COO and co-founder of a nonprofit focused on developing an online learning platform for young students. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Alabama and his MBA from Johns Hopkins University.

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