The Aspen Institute

In collaboration with the Aspen Economic Strategy Group
Featuring Adena T. Friedman, Chair and CEO, Nasdaq; Rob Portman, former US Senator from Ohio; and Cecilia Rouse, former Chair, Council of Economic Advisers; in conversation with Greg Ip, Chief Economics Commentator and Deputy Economics Editor, The Wall Street Journal. The US economy faces stubbornly high inflation, rising interest rates, and a potential recession. These challenges have been made even harder by a series of shocks: the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, the invasion of Ukraine, bank failures, budget brinkmanship and growing tensions between China and the West. This session will explore how policymakers and key stakeholders in the economy can navigate these shocks to keep the economy and labor market as resilient as possible.
Live event, Paepcke Auditorium

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Adena Friedman became President and Chief Executive Officer of Nasdaq on January 1, 2017, and is Chair of the Board of Directors. She brings more than 20 years of industry leadership and expertise, and is credited with significantly shaping Nasdaq’s transformation into a leading global exchange and technology solutions company with operations across six continents. Prior to being named CEO, Adena served as President and Chief Operating Officer throughout 2016 and was responsible for overseeing all of the company’s business segments with a focus on driving efficiency, product development, growth and expansion. She rejoined Nasdaq in 2014, after serving as Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director of The Carlyle Group from March 2011 to June 2014 and playing a critical role in taking the company public in May 2012. Before Carlyle, Adena was a key member of Nasdaq’s management team for over a decade, serving in a variety of roles, including head of the company’s data products business, head of corporate strategy and Chief Financial Officer. She played an instrumental role in Nasdaq’s acquisition strategy, overseeing the acquisitions of INET, OMX, and the Philadelphia and Boston Exchanges. She originally joined Nasdaq in 1993 as an intern. Since December 2018, Adena has served as a Class B director to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She was elected to the Board of Directors of FCLTGlobal, a non-profit organization that researches tools to encourage long-term investing, in January 2020. Adena began her term as a member of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust on July 1, 2020. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Williams College in Massachusetts and a Master of Business Administration from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

Rob Portman is a former US Senator from Ohio and Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Practice of Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Portman’s career in public service spanned three decades and included service in three presidential administrations as well as two terms in the United States Senate and six terms in the United States House of Representatives. In the George W. Bush administration he served in two cabinet-level jobs, as Director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as United States Trade Representative. Under President George H.W. Bush, he served as Associate Counsel to the President and Director, White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Known for his civility, successful bipartisan policy making, work ethic, and grasp of a broad range of complex issues, over 220 of Portman’s bills were signed into law by Presidents Biden, Trump and Obama during his tenure in the Senate. He served as the lead Republican negotiator on the bipartisan infrastructure law that is making historic improvements to our nation’s roads, ports, rails, bridges, broadband and more. He played a key role in U.S. foreign policy through his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as co-chair and founder of the Senate Ukraine Caucus. He made ten trips to Ukraine since the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 and is a key advocate for congressional support of Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression. Portman currently serves as the Founder of the Portman Center for Policy Solutions at the University of Cincinnati and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Practice of Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Rob was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he still lives today with his wife, Jane. Together they have three adult children: Jed, Will, and Sally.

Cecilia Rouse joined Princeton’s faculty in 1992 after earning her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where she also completed her undergraduate studies. Between 2009 and 2011, Rouse served as a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, a three-member panel providing the President with analysis and advice on various domestic and international economic policy issues. She also worked as a special assistant to President Clinton at the National Economic Council from 1998 to 1999. A labor economist specializing in the economics of education, Rouse is the founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Education. She has served as a senior editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by the School of Public and International Affairs and the Brookings Institution, co- editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, and on the editorial board of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and other journals. She previously served on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations, University of Rhode Island and the National Bureau of Economic Research and was an independent director of the T. Rowe Price Funds. Rouse has authored influential papers on topics such as the economic benefits of community college attendance, sex discrimination in symphony orchestras, the impact of Milwaukee’s private school voucher program on student achievement, the effect of student loan debt on college graduates’ career choices, the influence of computer-assisted instruction on students’ reading and math performance, and the consequences of Florida’s school accountability and voucher programs on student achievement and school administrators’ decision-making. Rouse recently concluded her tenure as the 30th Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, becoming the first African American to hold this position. In November 2020, Joe Biden nominated Rouse to be the Chair. Before this role, she served as the dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Greg Ip is chief economics commentator and deputy economics editor for The Wall Street Journal. He writes about domestic and global economic developments and policy in the weekly Capital Account column. From 2008 to January, 2015, he was United States economics editor for The Economist, based in Washington, D.C. Ip has won or shared in several prizes for journalism. He is the author of The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World (Wiley, 2010) and Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe (Little, Brown, 2015). A native of Canada, Ip received a bachelor’s degree in economics and journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario.

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