Alex J. Pollock
Former Distinguished Senior Fellow, Finance, Insurance & Trade
About Alex
Alex J. Pollock is a former distinguished senior fellow with the R Street Institute, now a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, who provides thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts; financial crises with their political responses; housing finance; government-sponsored enterprises; risk and uncertainty; central banking; banking and financial regulation; corporate governance; retirement finance; student loans and the politics of finance.
Pollock served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department since 2019. He was previously with R Street 2015-2019, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need to know what they are committing themselves to. He was president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Pollock was a long-serving director of the CME Group and of Ascendium Education Group. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
He lives in Lake Forest, Illinois, with his wife; they have four grown children and 10 grandchildren. His interests include political finance, policy, history, ideas, management, music, and the pursuit of clarity.
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