Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The bestselling author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus (2002) and The War of the World (2006), he also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. Ferguson has written and presented four highly successful television documentary series for British television: Empire, American Colossus, The War of the World, and, most recently, The Ascent of Money. He, his wife and their three children divide their time between the United Kingdom and the United States.

John Steele Gordon has been a lifelong author and commentator on New York’s business and financial history. His books include Hamilton’s Blessing: the Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt (1997), The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000 (1999), and An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (2004). His next book will be a history of the world economy. Gordon is also a frequent commentator on Marketplace, the daily public radio business-news program, and has appeared on CNBC, PBS, ABC’s 20/20, Bloomberg, and C-SPAN television.

Nouriel Roubini is a professor of economics and international business at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and co-founder and chairman of RGE Monitor, an economic and geo-strategic information service. He was a faculty member of the economics department at Yale University (1988-95), a senior economist for international affairs at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (1998-99), and senior adviser to the undersecretary for international affairs and the director of the Office of Policy Development and Review at the US Treasury Department (1999-2000). He is a fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He is co-author of Bailouts or Bail-Ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (2004).

Alex Berenson has been a business investigative reporter for the New York Times since 2000. He is the author of three novels and one non-fiction book, The Number, an explanation of how Wall Street’s obsession with short-term profits damages markets–and all of America.

Jim Chanos is the founder and Managing Partner of Kynikos Associates. As the largest exclusive short selling investment firm, Kynikos provides investment management services for both domestic and offshore clients. Chanos opened Kynikos Associates in 1985 to implement investment strategies he had uncovered while beginning his Wall Street carreer as a financial analyst with Paine Webber, Gilford Securities and Deutsche Bank. Throughout his investment career, Chanos has identified and sold short the shares of numerous well-known corporate financial disasters. His celebrated short-sale of Enron shares was recently dubbed by Barron’s as “the market call of the decade, if not the past fifty years.”

Nell Minow is the editor and co-founder of The Corporate Library, an independent corporate governance research firm. Previously, Minow was a Principal of Lens, a $100 million investment firm, President of Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc. and an attorney for the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice. In 2007 Directorship magazine named her one of the 20 most influential people in corporate governance and BusinessWeek Online (2003) dubbed her “the queen of good corporate governance.” She has authored more than 200 articles and co-authored three books, most recently the 4th edition of an MBA textbook called Corporate Governance, published in 2008.