public-finance
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Colin MacNaught
Colin MacNaught is the CEO and co-founder of BondLink, a Boston-based fintech company that brings modern technology and transparency to the municipal bond market. Before starting BondLink in 2015 with technologist Carl Query, he spent seven years managing debt for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, issuing close to $25 billion in bonds and notes and earning two national Deal of the Year awards from The Bond Buyer. He studied public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and built BondLink to give public-sector issuers digital tools to reach investors, improve disclosure, and lower borrowing costs for taxpayers.
Allison Schrager
Allison Schrager is an economist who turned the study of risk into a full-contact reporting beat - hanging out with brothel madams, big-wave surfers, paparazzi and horse breeders to figure out how the best risk-takers actually decide. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Bloomberg Opinion columnist and City Journal contributing editor, she holds a PhD in economics from Columbia and once helped Nobel laureate Robert Merton design retirement products. Her 2019 book 'An Economist Walks into a Brothel' argued that financial theory belongs everywhere people gamble with their futures; her follow-up, 'Worth the Risk,' is due from Yale University Press in September 2026.
Chris Papagianis
Chris Papagianis is the Chief Strategy Officer of Hudson Bay Capital Management, a multi-strategy hedge fund, a role he took in November 2023. Before that he spent nearly eight years as a partner at Paulson & Co. and president of the Paulson Family Foundation, working public markets, private investments, and the firm's government affairs. His path runs through the West Wing - he was Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under George W. Bush - and through the policy-shop world, where he ran Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute and became one of Washington's most cited voices on housing finance and the unfinished business of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Harvard grad, Peabody Fellow, congressional witness, and a rare operator equally fluent in spreadsheets and statute.
Marc Goldwein
Marc Goldwein is the Senior Vice President and Senior Policy Director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), where he has become Washington's most-quoted referee of how much the federal government can afford. A two-degree Johns Hopkins economist who once ran track for the Blue Jays, he helped staff the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Commission and the 2011 'Super Committee,' teaches economics on the side, and now spends his days scoring the price tag of nearly every major bill and campaign promise. He talks fast, deploys statistics faster, and has made a career of telling both parties the same unwelcome thing: the math does not add up.
Michael Strain
Michael R. Strain is one of Washington's most-cited economists - director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, author of 'The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It),' and a columnist whose data-first optimism cuts against the grain of both parties. He studies labor markets, macroeconomics, public finance, and social policy, testifies before Congress, teaches at Georgetown, and writes for the Financial Times and Project Syndicate.
Nicole Gelinas
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Post columnist who has become one of the most-cited voices on how New York moves, pays its bills, and keeps itself safe. A Chartered Financial Analyst turned urban-policy writer, she translates municipal bonds, subway capital plans, and congestion-pricing math into prose ordinary readers can follow. Her 2024 book Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car won the 2025 Gotham Book Prize and reframed the century-long fight over the city's streets as a story with many heroes, not just one Robert Moses villain.
Stan Veuger
Stan Veuger is a Dutch-born economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies political economy and public finance, and who became briefly famous in 2025 for co-authoring the AEI analysis that exposed a factor-of-four error at the heart of the Trump administration's reciprocal tariff formula. A Harvard PhD with a stack of unrelated degrees in Spanish literature, law, and business, he edits AEI Economic Perspectives, teaches at Harvard, and once published peer-reviewed research proving that LeBron James measurably increased the number of restaurants near his arena.
Jase Wilson
Jase Wilson grew up in rural Missouri, earned a Master of City Planning from MIT, and has spent two decades trying to wire America together. After helping land Google Fiber's first network in Kansas City, founding and ultimately losing Neighborly - a civic fintech built on municipal bonds - he pivoted to Ready.net in 2019. Now, as founder and CEO, he runs a Y Combinator-backed vertical SaaS platform that helps state broadband offices manage billions in federal BEAD grants and track sub-grantee performance, with $14.6M in total funding and a team of 62.