Phillip Swagel

Phillip Lee "Phill" Swagel
Online White House archives of President George W. Bush. Accessed Jan. 8, 2014. (born June 8, 1966) is an American economist who is currently the director of the Congressional Budget Office. As Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 2006 to 2009, he played an important role in the Troubled Asset Relief Program that was part of the U.S. government's response to the financial crisis of 2007–08. He was recently a Professor in International Economics at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, senior fellow at the Milken Institute, and co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative.

Educated at Princeton University and Harvard University, Swagel has taught economics at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, in addition to Maryland. He has also worked at the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the White House Council of Economic Advisors.

Education and early career

Swagel graduated from Los Alamitos High School in Los Alamitos, California. He graduated with an A.B. in economics from Princeton University in 1987 after completing a 128-page long senior thesis titled "Examining the Competitiveness Debate: Optimal Trade Policies for Two Oligopolistic Industries." He went on to do graduate work at Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1993.Phillip Swagel
. University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Accessed Jan. 8, 2014.

From 1992 to 1995 Swagel worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors,Phillip Swagel
American Enterprise Institute. Accessed Jan. 8, 2014. the governing body of the Federal Reserve System, the central bank of the United States. From 1994 to 1996 he taught macroeconomics and international economics as a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University. He was an economist at the International Monetary Fund from 1996 to 2002. During this time he and Matthew J. Slaughter published a working paper asserting that changes in technology rather than globalization were responsible for increases in inequality between skilled and unskilled workers in developed countries.

Swagel began his service in government in August 2000, when he joined the White House Council of Economic Advisers as a senior economist, a position he held until July 2001. He returned to the Council as chief of staff in July 2002. He was replaced in February 2005 by Gary Blank, who had been deputy policy director in President George W. Bush's re-election campaign the year before. Swagel became a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) the next month.

Treasury Department

After Bush appointed Henry Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury in 2006, Paulson recruited Swagel to join his staff at the Department of the Treasury. Swagel left AEI in October, and in December he was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy following confirmation by the U.S. Senate. In this role he was the Treasury Department's chief economist.Henry Paulson. ''On the Brink''. Business Plus, 2010.

Beginning in summer 2007, the value of some financial instruments backed by U.S. subprime mortgages declined sharply as it became clear that many of the borrowers would default on the mortgages. This caused a crisis as the banks holding the mortgages saw their assets decline in value and rushed to foreclose the loans. Swagel investigated many of these mortgages for Treasury, finding that in many cases borrowers were in homes they could not afford.

In early 2008, fearing that the crisis could escalate, Paulson directed Swagel and fellow Treasury aide Neel Kashkari