Dewey Daane

The Financial Markets Research Center at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management will honor J. Dewey Daane during the FMRC's annual conference, April 17-18, 2009.

Having been appointed to the body by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Daane served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.  He has been a chaired professor at Owen since 1974.

FMRC Director Hans Stoll told VNC yesterday that while the current global financial imbroglio will probably still provide the backdrop for the event, the gathering of luminaries from the ranks of the Fed, business, government and academe will focus on the contributions of Daane, who turned 90 in July.  Stoll declined to provide for publication the still-growing list of dignitaries who have already accepted invitations to speak in April.

Daane is Vanderbilt's Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance and remains a senior advisor to the FMRC. In addition to 35 years' service to the Federal Reserve System, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Daane played an active role as deputy to then-Federal Research Chairman Paul Volcker during periods of international monetary crises.

The choice of the FMRC's annual topic has often seemed prescient during the nearly 22 years since the center was founded.

A year ago, in fall 2007, while Stoll was laying plans for the April 2008 conference, the first wave of the credit crunch was tightening its grip, and Stoll decided that "Securitization" would be the focus for the symposium.

In his December release of the 2008 agenda, Stoll wrote that securitization, while creating "liquidity and diversification" for investors, also raised weighty issues, among them: the quality of underlying assets, questions regarding transparency and the roles of credit-rating agencies and credit insurers. Stoll's agenda singled-out for attention mortgages that are "packaged into pools against which collateralized mortgage obligations are issued..."

Topics for the 20 previous annual meetings have included conflicts of interest, exchange governance and corporate behavior, to international financial policy, innovation, global volatility and reform, among other issues.

One Daane biography notes that much of Daane's teaching "has focused on the evolution of the international monetary system and on monetary and fiscal policy patterning his seminar after the famous Fiscal Policy Seminar at Harvard’s Littauer School, the predecessor to the Kennedy School of Government." While studying at Harvard, Daane earned that university's first doctorate in public administration, in 1949, as well as a master's. He earned his undergraduate degree at Duke University. ♦