Peter J. Wallison’s legal career spans forty years in both private practice and government service – as a partner of Rogers & Wells and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and as counsel to Vice President Rockefeller, General Counsel of the United States Treasury, and then White House counsel under President Ronald Reagan.

He is the author or editor of numerous books – Back From the Brink, a proposal for a private deposit insurance system; Nationalizing Mortgage Risk: The Growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; The GAAP Gap: Corporate Disclosure in the Internet Age; Competitive Equity: A Better Way to Organize Mutual Funds; Optional Federal Chartering and Regulation of Insurance Companies; Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and his most recent book, Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act.

He has testified frequently before committees of Congress, and is a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and other print and online journals. He also has been a speaker at many conferences on financial services, housing, the causes of the financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act, accounting, and corporate governance, and is a member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting (2008), co-Chair of the Pew Financial Reform Task Force (2009), and a member of the congressionally-authorized Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2009-2011).

In May 2011, for his work in financial policy, Mr. Wallison received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Colorado.

In addition to his work at Wallison & Wallison, Mr. Wallison, until 2019, held the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and served as co-director of AEI’s program on Financial Policy Studies.