January 22, 2010                                                      

AMHERST, Mass.—On Thursday, Feb. 11, at 8 p.m. in Cole Assembly Room of Amherst College’s Converse Hall, the school will host a panel discussion on the causes, consequences and lessons of the financial crisis with three prominent alumni in finance, as well as Robert Pozen, chairman of MFS Investment Management and author of Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System. Alumni participating include George Carmany of Amherst’s Class of 1962, senior advisor of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.; Kevin Conway ’80, managing partner of Clayton Dubilier & Rice, LLC (CD&R); and Walter Donovan ’85, chief investment officer of Putnam Investments. The public is welcome to attend and participate in the conversation.

Carmany has worked in various capacities for the American Express Company, The Boston Company, the Olympia & York Bondholders’ Steering Committee and his own GW Carmany and Company, Inc. In addition to leading his own firm, he now serves as director of Sun Life Financial in Toronto and Macquarie Infrastructure Company in New York; vice chairman of Computerized Medical Systems, a manufacturer of software used in the delivery of radiation therapy in St. Louis; and senior advisor to EnGeneIC Pty. Ltd., a biotechnology company in Sydney, Australia. He is also a senior advisor to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. and The Asia Link Group of Beijing. He is involved with numerous philanthropic institutions as well as with his alma mater, which recognized his many years of volunteerism with its Distinguished Service Award in 2001.

Throughout his 15 years at CD&R, Conway has been active in a number of the firm’s investments and organizational initiatives. He chairs the screening committee, which evaluates all potential investments and works closely with CD&R’s president and CEO on all aspects of the firm’s operations. Previously, he was a senior member of the Goldman Sachs mergers and acquisitions department and, later, the chief of staff of the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs. Conway is frequently quoted in the financial media and has spoken at investment industry forums around the world.

At Putnam, Donovan oversees the management of the entire investment group. Prior to joining Putnam, he held a number of key positions at Fidelity Investments, including executive vice president and head of Equity Research, head of the High Income Division and leadership roles in Equity Trading, Structured Credit and Counterparty Risk Management. He also worked as a director on the corporate debt trading desk with Merrill Lynch Capital Markets for seven years, after beginning his career as a municipal bond trader and underwriter for Salomon Brothers.

In addition to serving as chairman of MFS Investment Management—which manages more than $200 billion in assets for more than five million investors worldwide—Pozen is an independent director of Medtronics and BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises). Prior to joining MFS, he was a professor at Harvard Law School, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and secretary of economic affairs for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He was also vice chairman of Fidelity Investments and president of Fidelity Management & Research Company. Before joining Fidelity, Pozen worked as a partner at Caplin & Drysdale, counsel to the Securities and Exchange Commission and law professor at Georgetown and New York Universities.

This discussion is sponsored by the Amherst College Economics Department.

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