Underwritings

William Nelson is an Executive Vice President and Chief Economist at the Bank Policy Institute. Previously he served as Executive Managing Director, Chief Economist, and Head of Research at the Clearing House Association and Chief Economist of the Clearing House Payments Company. Mr. Nelson contributed to and oversaw research and analysis to support the advocacy of the Association on behalf of TCH’s owner banks. Prior to joining The Clearing House in 2016, Mr. Nelson was a deputy director of the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board where his responsibilities included monetary policy analysis, discount window policy analysis, and financial institution supervision. Mr. Nelson attended Federal Open Market Committee meetings and regularly briefed the Board and FOMC. He was a member of the Large Institution Supervision Coordinating Committee (LISCC) and the steering committee of the Comprehensive Liquidity Analysis and Review (CLAR). He has chaired and participated in several BIS working groups on the design of liquidity regulations and most recently chaired the CGFS-Markets Committee working group on regulatory change and monetary policy. Mr. Nelson joined the Board in 1993 as an economist in the Banking section of Monetary Affairs. In 2004, he was the founding chief of the new Monetary and Financial Stability section of Monetary Affairs. In 2007 and 2008, he visited the Bank for International Settlements, in Basel, Switzerland, where his responsibilities included analyzing central banks’ responses to the financial crisis and researching the use of forward guidance by central banks. He returned to the Board in the fall of 2008 where he helped design and manage several of the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity facilities. Mr. Nelson earned a Ph.D., an M.S., and an M.A. in economics from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He has published research on a wide range of topics including monetary policy rules; monetary policy communications; and the intersection of monetary policy, lender of last resort policy, financial stability, and bank supervision and regulation.

Francisco Covas is currently Senior Vice President, Head of Research at the Bank Policy Institute. Prior to joining BPI, Mr. Covas served as Senior Vice President and Deputy Head of Research at the Clearing House Association, where he helped oversee research and analysis to support the advocacy of the Association on behalf of the owner banks. Prior to joining the Clearing House in 2016, Mr. Covas was an assistant director of the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board where he supervised a team focused on the effects of changes in bank regulation on monetary policy, on the role of banks in the transmission of monetary policy, and on the development and validation of stress testing models. Prior to that, he was an economist in the Division of Banking Supervision & Regulation and focused on a range of capital, liquidity and other regulatory initiatives. Mr. Covas earned a Ph.D. in economics from University of California, San Diego in 2004 and a B.A. from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal in 1997. He has written extensively on liquidity rules, capital regulation and stress testing and has published research on a wide range of journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Money Credit and Banking, International Journal of Forecasting, among other academic journals.