Chris Flanagan is a Managing Director, Fixed Income Strategist and Head of US Mortgage and Structured Finance Research at BofA Securities. He started his career on Wall Street in 1986 at Merrill Lynch as a mortgage analyst and switched to JP Morgan Chase from 2000-2010, before returning to BofA Merrill Lynch in 2010. He has perennially ranked on the Institutional Investor All-American Fixed Income Research team. He has BS and MS degrees in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA in Finance from the State University of New York at Albany.

For more information about any awards cited, visit https://go.bofa.com/awards

Laurie Goodman is an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute. She founded the Housing Finance Policy Center at Urban in 2013, and was its Director or Co-Director from 2013-2021. This Center provides policymakers with data-driven analyses of housing finance policy issues that they can depend on for relevance, accuracy, and independence.

Prior to joining Urban in 2013, Laurie spent 30 years as a mortgage-backed securities analyst and research department manager at a number of Wall Street firms, including Amherst Securities Group, LP, where she developed a reputation for her analysis of housing policy issues, and UBS, where she was a top ranked research analyst. She began her career as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Laurie serves on the Board of Directors of MFA Financial and Arch Capital Group Ltd, and is a consultant to The Amherst Group. She has published more than 250 articles in professional and academic journals and co-authored/co-edited five books. She has a BA in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, and an AM and PhD in Economics from Stanford University.

Dr. Mark Palim is Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at Fannie Mae, responsible for forecasts and analyses of the economy and the housing and mortgage markets. His team has won the Lawrence R. Klein Award for Blue Chip Forecast Accuracy and, on two occasions, the NABE Outlook Award. Mark also oversees strategic research regarding the potential impact of external factors on the housing industry, including the first work at the company on climate change. He is a key spokesperson on economic trends and a frequent speaker at national mortgage finance and housing industry events. Mark’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and professional handbooks.

Edward J. Pinto is a senior fellow and codirector of the AEI Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). A focus of his work continues to be the role of federal housing policy in the 2008 mortgage and financial crisis and how federal housing policy continues to create unwelcome distortions in the housing markets. More recently his research has focused on using light touch density to increase the supply of naturally affordable and inclusionary housing.

Along with AEI Resident Scholar Stephen Oliner, Mr. Pinto created the Wealth Building Home Mortgage, a new approach to home finance designed to provide a more reliable and effective way of building wealth than is available under existing policies. This mortgage allows home buyers to maintain a buying power similar to a 30-year loan. It is aimed at a broad range of homebuyers, including low-income, minority, and first-time buyers.

Before joining AEI, Mr. Pinto was an executive vice president and chief credit officer for Fannie Mae until the late 1980s. Today, he is frequently interviewed on radio and television and often testifies before Congress. His writings have been published in trade publications and the popular press, including in the American Banker, The Hill, RealClearPolitics, and The Wall Street Journal. In addition, as the director of the AEI Housing Center, he oversees the monthly publication of the AEI Housing Market Indicators, which has replaced AEI’s monthly Housing Risk Watch and AEI’s FHA Watch.

Mr. Pinto has a JD from Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Andy Walden, Vice President of Enterprise Research Strategy for ICE Mortgage Technology, is one of the most recognized faces in Housing Finance. A regular contributor on CNBC, Andy’s insights are sought by some of the nation’s most-respected media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as many mortgage industry trade publications. A technically skilled analyst and the guiding force behind ICE's monthly Mortgage Monitor, he is known for his clear, understandable, even folksy explanations of complex topics. With nearly two decades of industry experience – including default servicing operations, market surveillance and applied mortgage analytics – Andy is uniquely suited to bring clarity to the complex machinations of the American housing market.