Norbert J. Michel, Vice President and Director, Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, The Cato Institute, will be our guest speaker at the Exchequer Club meeting on Wednesday, January 15, 2025.

Norbert J. Michel is vice president and director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Michel leads a team of nearly one dozen scholars that develop original policy solutions to expand freedom through improving financial markets and monetary policy. In addition to producing policy publications, his team regularly engages with policymakers on Capitol Hill. Michel is also the author of the forthcoming book Crushing Capitalism: How the Stagnation Narrative is Threatening the American Dream, and coauthor (with the CMFA’s Jen Schulp) of Financing Opportunity: How Financial Markets Have Fueled American Prosperity for More than Two Centuries.

Michel was most recently the Director for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation where he edited, and contributed chapters, to two books: The Case against Dodd–Frank: How the “Consumer Protection” Law Endangers Americans, and Prosperity Unleashed: Smarter Financial Regulation.

Michel was previously a tenured professor at Nicholls State University’s College of Business, teaching finance, economics and statistics. Before that, he worked at Heritage as a tax policy analyst in the think tank’s Center for Data Analysis from 2002 to 2005. He previously was with the global energy company Entergy, where he worked on models to help predict bankruptcies of commercial clients.

Michel holds a doctoral degree in financial economics from the University of New Orleans. He received his bachelor of business administration in finance and economics from Loyola University. He currently resides in Virginia.