Carmen M. Reinhart is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Reinhart held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s, where she became interested in financial crises, international contagion and commodity price cycles. Subsequently, she spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reinhart has served on numerous editorial boards, panels, and has testified before congress. She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade including: international capital flows, exchange rates, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises for over a decade. In the early 1990s, she wrote (with Guillermo Calvo) about the fickleness of capital flows to emerging markets and the likelihood of abrupt reversals--before the Mexican crisis of 1994-1995. Prior to the Asian crisis (1997-1998), she documented (with Graciela Kaminsky) the international historical links between asset price bubbles and banking crises, and how the latter could lead to currency crashes creating a "twin crisis." She identified (with Ken Rogoff) the possibility of severe economic dislocations from the sub-prime crisis in 2007. Her work is frequently featured in the financial press around the world, including The Economist, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She has appeared in CNN, CSPAN, BBC, and NPR, among others.

Her latest book (with Kenneth Rogoff) entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton Press) documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history.

Kenneth Rogoff is Boas Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and former chief economist at the IMF. His influential and best-selling 2009 book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, shows the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the roots and aftermath of debt and financial crises. Rogoff is also known for his pioneering work on central bank independence, and on exchange rates. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries. His newest book, Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance and the Road Ahead, explores the post-war rise of the dollar, the challenges ahead from crypto and the Chinese yuan, and argues that the period of reliably low interest rates, inflation and exchange rate volatility has likely come to an end, and that the dollar's dominance will be reduced. Rogoff has long ranked among the top ten most cited economists, and is an international grandmaster of chess.