Speaker

Jim Chanos

Founder and Managing Partner of Chanos & Company LP

Jim Chanos is the founder and Managing Partner of Chanos & Company LP (f.k.a. Kynikos Associates LP). As the world’s largest exclusive short selling investment firm, Chanos & Company LP provides investment management services for domestic and offshore clients. Through investment funds, partnerships, corporations, and managed accounts – domestic and offshore – Chanos & Company LP maintains private portfolios of securities for clients. The Kynikos Capital Partners, Kynikos Global Capital Partners, Ursus, Kriticos, and Kynikos Opportunity funds seek to profit from the unusually high alphas found on the long and short side of the U.S. and non-U.S. equity markets.

Mr. Chanos opened Kynikos Associates LP in 1985 to implement investment strategies he had uncovered while beginning his Wall Street career as a financial analyst with Paine Webber, Gilford Securities, and Deutsche Bank. Throughout his investment career, Mr. Chanos has identified and sold short the shares of numerous well-known corporate financial disasters; among them, Baldwin-United, Commodore International, First Executive, Integrated Resources, Boston Chicken, Sunbeam, Conseco, Tyco International, WorldCom, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and Wirecard. His celebrated short-sale of Enron shares was dubbed by Barron’s as “the market call of the decade, if not the past fifty years.” The media has noted his prescience in alerting finance ministers and others about the global financial crisis well before it occurred. His views on financial market fraud, capital markets regulation and the Chinese financial system, among other topics, are regularly covered by news organizations worldwide.

Mr. Chanos has testified before Congress and provided comments to regulations proposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mr. Chanos lives in New York City, and has four children. He is currently a Lecturer in Finance at both the Yale School of Management and the University of Wisconsin School of Business, where he teaches a class on the history of financial fraud. He currently serves as a Trustee at The New York Historical Society and The Brooklyn Museum. Mr. Chanos received his BA in economics and political science in 1980 from Yale University.

Moderator

Sean Egan, MBA 1981

CEO Egan-Jones Ratings, Egan-Jones Proxy Services

Sean Egan is a founding partner and president of Egan-Jones Ratings Company (Egan-Jones), which was organized in 1995 for the purpose of providing timely, accurate credit ratings. Over the past decade, Egan-Jones provided risk managers with warnings on Ambac, Countrywide, Enron, Greece, Lehman, MBIA, New Century and many others well in advance of the majority of market participants. Fortune Magazine named Mr. Egan the number one person for warning about the 2007 credit crisis. Mr. Egan has appeared on most major media outlets and has testified numerous times in front of Congressional committees. Prior to founding Egan-Jones, Mr. Egan worked as a commercial banker for JP Morgan, as an investment banker for Oppenheimer, and as a management consultant with KPMG Peat Marwick. Mr. Egan graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo and received an MBA from Harvard Business School.