 The film you're about to see honors Edward or Ned Gramlich for a lifetime of achievements. Ned, it's your outstanding work as a scholar, a leader, and a public servant that we wish to extol. Each of the persons in this film also considers Ned the very best of friends and colleagues, and as you will quickly hear, among the most balanced and thoughtful of individuals. I must confess that one of the major problems we had in putting together this film was that so many people wanted to contribute and had a lot to say. This speaks to the breadth and depth of your influence on so many people and of your many, many achievements. I'm Harvey Galper and I've known Ned now for over 40 years. From the time I first came to Washington in 1966 to work on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board and Ned was there on the staff as well having joined it just the year before. In fact, I am pleased and proud to note that on Ned's CV, a joint article on forecasting defense spending was the very first piece that either of us had done and which was published. And I can say that although I might not have launched his career, at least I did not sink it. Ned's work at the Federal Reserve Board, the five years that he was there, was very, very important work and he was involved in a project which was one of the best and largest projects that the Federal Government had sponsored in economic research. The project was developing the Federal Reserve Board macroeconometric model and Ned was a very major contributor to that effort. The model was sometimes called at that time the Federal Reserve Board PEN-MIT model because also participating in the effort were Professor Albert Andow at PEN and Professor Franco Medigliani at MIT. So it was clearly a major and important research program. The purpose of the model was to explore the various channels through which monetary policy affected the macroeconomy. And Ned wrote several pieces about the model both as articles and as a book in addition to being responsible for one of the major sectors in the model itself. That sector was the state and local sector in which Ned incorporated various real-world aspects of that sector into the model such as the constraint under which state and local governments had to operate as well as result of the laws which prohibited borrowing for current expenditures and also their capital expenditures which were influenced by monetary policy because of the cost of funds that they had to incur to construct these projects. One important thing to note about Ned's work is that at the Fed the projects he got involved in informed much of his research from that time on. Not only was he interested in major macroeconomic issues but he became quite expert in various aspects of research related to the state and local government sector including the effect of grants on state and local government, fiscal federalism generally both in the United States and in other countries and the delivery of services via government to individual citizens. After he left the Fed for after being there for five years he then went on to be the director of research at the Office of Economic Opportunity where we again continued his interest in service delivery mechanisms in this case for education as well as on the effects of various types of grant programs on state and local governments. I was fortunate enough to receive a grant from OEO to explore some of these issues of how local governments responded to various types of grants and was again co-authored with Ned of a number of pieces in that area. So I would say that one thing about Ned is his early work informed much of his later work and he had developed into what I would say is one of the finest public policy economists of our generation. I am pleased to have known him and worked with him over the past 40 years and regard him not only as a valued colleague but as a wonderful devoted friend. I'm Henry Aaron, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It's a real pleasure along with some of Ned Gramlich's many, many friends to have a chance to pay tribute to his outstanding career and his many valuable and enduring contributions to economics and to public policy and to join with those who simply like him because he's a genuinely good human being. First, I have no doubt that it would have been possible to assemble a very long recording if even a small fraction of Ned's friends were included in this celebration. Ned's a rare bird, a really smart guy who is entirely uninterested in strutting his intelligence, who works on problems that are substantively interesting and important and who tells you what he has found in simple, straightforward language. I've known Ned for about 35 years. I think we met when he was director of research at the Office for Economic Opportunity perhaps earlier but for sure when he joined the Brookings staff in 1973. I want to use my few minutes to talk about contributions that I happen to know perhaps a bit more about than some of the others who will be speaking because they involve fields in which I also did some work. The first is baseball. In 1991 completely out of the blue, I received a phone call from Don Fear, head of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Don asked me whether I would be willing to serve on a commission to study the economic future of baseball. My first reaction was, who's playing a joke on me? Hank Aaron, baseball, haha. But it turned out it wasn't a joke and I said yes. At the first meeting it became clear that the commission badly needed a research director. It was going to gather a lot of information and the information needed analyzing. I suggested Ned. Coming from me, a player designated member, my suggestion was suspect to Bud Sealy, who was the commission co-chair appointed by the owners and to the owner appointed members of the commission, Paul Volcker and Peter Goldmark. But they relented and contacted Ned and once they talked to him, he was clearly just too good to pass. The work Ned did was honest and as complete as the data grudgingly provided by the teams would permit. Furthermore, it was devastating to one key argument of the owners. They held that large market baseball teams had hugely more money than small market teams do and that was true. But they also held that the gap made it impossible for small market teams to compete effectively and as Ned's work showed, that was untrue. Large market teams did have an edge, yes they did, but it wasn't an enormous one. This finding as it happened completely undercut the basis for a key goal that the owners were pursuing in this commission. It was that players' salaries should be tightly capped in order to restore competitive balance among the teams. But here's the key point. Ned maintained cordial working relations with all members of the commission. He did so because his analysis was straightforward and irrefutable and because of his meat and potatoes manner. This was not a finding of a full of himself economist but the honest explanation of the numbers in straightforward terms by a smart guy who had done his homework. And that combination of traits is what has distinguished Ned's work throughout his career. It still does as his most recent and I think perhaps his most important piece of work tests. There have been two great revolutions in home ownership in the United States. The first one occurred just after World War II when under the leadership of the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, the fully amortized low down payment mortgage became readily available to everybody who had an adequate credit rating. The proportion of Americans who owned their own homes increased by nearly half. My first book at Brookings happened to deal with those policies. But this revolution did not encompass those with poor credit ratings. The excluded groups included many low income whites but disproportionately comprised African Americans and Hispanics. They were routinely denied home loans. Whole neighborhoods were redlined. Now part of the problem was blatant discrimination but most of it in fact was created by well intention but harmful laws and regulations. So in the mid 1990s a number of new laws federal and state removed constraints that had forced such limits and introduced incentives for these new laws introduced incentives for lenders to open up what has come to be the so-called subprime mortgage market. The result? Home ownership rates jumped again. Not as much as they had done a generation earlier but still enough to represent something of a revolution for low and moderate income families, especially minority group families. There was an unfortunate side effect, an increase in defaults and a spread of some very serious marketing abuses. While at the Federal Reserve as a member of the Board of Governors, Ned was in charge of the group that oversaw some of the lenders making those loans. Early in this decade as the economy softened defaults among subprime lenders, mortgages shot up. And at that point many people wondered whether the whole experiment with subprime mortgages maybe had been a mistake. So when Ned left the Fed he set to work to chronicle what had happened, why the subprime market is worth preserving, what went wrong, and what to do about it. He wrote up the results in an easy-to-read practical guide to legislators and regulators on what to do to preserve the gains in home ownership resulting from these subprime mortgages and to reduce or eliminate the problems that have recently been widely reported in the press. I think that this book may be Ned's most important piece of work. It deals with a policy that directly benefits tens of millions of Americans and that brings economic justice to groups that have suffered and continue to suffer various forms of discrimination. The book is clear, it's easy to read, and it is persuasive. It encapsulates Ned's career. It incorporates solid scholarship, a record of public service, an unerring eye for issues that count, and a resolute refusal to distract readers with unnecessary academic jargon or pretensions. Ned, the economics profession needs more like you. I'm George Perry, and I've known Ned since the early 1970s when he first came to the Birkins Institution, where I work, and where Art Okin and I recruited him to be one of the participants, regular participants in the Birkins panel, which we had just formed. I went back to look at some of those early issues and what struck me was just how broad the topics that Ned dealt with for us was. He really covered the waterfront on the kind of policy issues that we dealt with. The first paper he wrote was one with Harvey Galper, in which they took on the issues surrounding general revenue sharing, which had just been instigated by the federal government. They analyzed how different kinds of government grants would affect state and local budgets, and it's an analysis that stands up very well to this day. He went on from that. He did several other papers on the state and local budget issues as it became topical, and they were always kind of the best thing you could read on the subject. When Reagan promoted fiscal federalism, Ned had a paper about that. When the state and local budgets got into trouble in the early 90s, and that again analyzed that situation, and if I remember his conclusion, one of his inferences there was that the federal government should take over the state financing of the Medicaid programs. By the mid-70s, unemployment had become a big problem with the huge recession then, and Ned was the first person to do a thorough analysis of how the burden of unemployment fell on different families according to their family status. He quantified the disproportionate impact on families headed by black males, and surprisingly showed that families headed by black females fared much better for reasons which he could dig out of his data. Their employment was less cyclically sensitive, and the transfer system was more supportive. Ned, in a subsequent paper, tackled an interesting question which is how to minimize the cost of disinflating an economy when inflation was a big problem. The basic question he posed was if you have to take a lot of unemployment, do you take all of it early on and then let unemployment fall, or do you spread a modest rise in unemployment over a much longer period of time? His conclusion in that one I think would still stand up today after a lot more experience, a lot more theorizing, which was take it early because of the negative effects that you get from past unemployment when you're trying to reduce unemployment in the present. Then near the end of the decade he tackled a question concerning what special considerations arose in stabilization policy when you're confronted with inflationary supply shocks, which of course is what the 1970s were all about, and that's a topic that I'm sure he came back to quite a few years later when he was governor at the Federal Reserve in the early 2000s. Now these were Ned's earliest years. Actually, Ned is one of those people who I think got even better as he matured. One thing that I liked a lot were Ned's, what I'll call, speech papers that he gave when he was Fed governor. The ones that I especially like reading were the ones about stabilization issues since they concerned me professionally. I thought they were at the heart of what he was doing at the Fed. He confronted all kinds of topics that are really at the forefront of the professional debate and the professional literature as well as things that central bankers worry about. Should there be inflation targeting? Should we have rules rather than discretion in the conduct of monetary policy? What were the roles for fiscal as opposed to monetary policy? In these papers, Ned always laid out the professional arguments. He then looked at the empirical evidence and then he discussed where he came out and why. I think anybody in the audience would have decided that the Fed was in very good hands with people that sounded like Ned did in those papers. I really admired them a lot and I thought they were just professionally first rate. Anybody who hasn't looked back on those ought to. One thing I've always regretted is that we never could get Ned to come back to Brookings after he left the Fed. He was a wonderful colleague and a great fellow and he's of the economists that I know. He's the only one that I can play either chess or tennis with and not be confident whether I'm going to win or lose. And that doesn't get any better than that. I want to stress two aspects of Ned's economic research and policy making. First, through all of his career, Ned has focused himself on real world issues and problems. That research of his routinely incorporates advanced econometric and analytic techniques. But Ned never was for churning out the economic equivalent of finger exercises. He's concentrated his life's work towards gaining a better understanding of how the economy actually works. Typically with the objective of figuring out how economic outcomes could be improved with better policy. Through realistically feasible and usually incremental steps. To borrow a pertinent comment from Alan Blinder about Robert Solow, Ned Gramelik has dedicated a large part of his career to the proposition that economics from the real world, for the real world and of the real world shall not perish from the earth. Second, Ned's work has been particularly useful for policy makers since much of it involves identifying elements, critical elements of economic issues. And then disentangling the required carefully targeted policy measures from overly sweeping partisan responses to the issue of the day. One example was Ned's seminal research in intra-governmental grants. During the often very partisan debates in the early 1980s about the proper form and extent of federal grants to state and local governments, Ned carefully laid out the theoretical and empirical case why income distribution programs need to remain heavily, even if not solely, a federal responsibility. And that went down not at all well with the conservative right. But at the same time, he spelled out the analysis and assembled the data which showed that funds distributed by the federal government, the state and local governments through narrow catechorical grants, typically after a while, ended up diverted into the general revenue coffers of the recipient governments. And as a consequence, of course, those programs very often accomplished very little towards the objectives they were designed for. Ned's ability to sort through a major public policy issue so as to separate the wheat from the chaff and the baby from the bathwater is particularly strong in his recent book that was just published by the Urban Institute on the subprime mortgage market. Finally, a personal anecdote that captures a bit of Ned's quick wit. Ned once reviewed a book of mine for the Journal of Economic Literature. The book was a series of memos written to an imaginary new president who had promised to give his CEH airman a little time each week to explain exactly what the president ought to know about macroeconomics. Ned's opening paragraph immediately captured the essence of the problem. Slightly abbreviated, it went something like this. My evaluation of this book is close to the usual evaluation of Columbus' trip to the New World. Did Columbus find India? No. Was the trip worthwhile? Yes. As a one-time colleague and a long-time admirer and user of Ned's work, here's a salute, Ned. I'm Alice Rivlin. Like Ned, I'm an economist who cares deeply about making public policy better. Indeed, I've always thought of Ned as a kindred spirit, I think because we had so many interests in common, a wide range of policies that we thought were worth working on. These include state and local finance, a very important subject that doesn't get the attention it deserves, educational functioning, federal tax and budget policy, monetary policy and social security to mention just a few. Because of these similar interests, our careers have intersected and overlapped at an astonishing number of points over about four decades in many of the same places. We first were colleagues at the Brookings Institution in the early 1970s where Ned wrote a fascinating book about a series of educational experiments. We both got interested in the problems of federal budget choice and contributed to the influential Brookings series setting national priorities. We both worked hard, although at different times, to make the Congressional Budget Office a high quality place and we served together at the Federal Reserve Board. I just looked over Ned's publication list. It's an awesome list. It reminded me of the breadth and the depth of his contributions to serious policy economics. I was astonished at how many of his books and articles I remembered well, reading and at the time thinking, wow, that's really good analysis and it's analysis of an important subject. So I see three consistent themes in Ned's career. First, he does really solid, thorough analysis, no sloppiness, no cutting corners. Second, he works on really important subjects. If and when we screw up our national courage to fix the social security system, the path chosen will have been illuminated by Ned's work. The same goes for the federal budget deficit and for the subprime lending problem among others. Third, Ned understands that institutions matter and they don't work well without a lot of effort to enhance their morale and set a standard of quality. The Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve, the University of Michigan are just three of the institutions that are stronger because Ned was there and committed a lot of his time and energy and intelligence and common sense to making the work better. I'm Paul Courant, an economist and longtime colleague and friend of Ned's. I first met him in 1976 when I was a member of the search committee that brought Ned to Michigan. I've been on a lot of search committees since and none has had a better outcome. I'm going to talk for a few minutes about Ned's academic work. There's lots of it. Most of it is very good, some of it is great, all of it is useful. I'm going to talk for a few minutes about Ned's work on macroeconomics that it defies straightforward characterization by field of economics. From the very beginning, Ned's work has dealt with macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy. From near the beginning, he has worked in labor economics with an interest in poverty, public employment and education. Also, he has always worked on public economics, again with papers on poverty, the effectiveness of social programs, public employment, education and fiscal federalism. The public economics then unites the federal macroeconomic policy, which Ned more or less invented, and threw out a concern with national saving and economic growth. And then there was social security, housing, economic policy on three continents. The list goes on. Indeed, to read the titles of all of his papers would take longer than I'm going to take in this discussion today. Ned's style of work is by turns empirical, theoretical, comparative, institutional, methodological. The analysis is both positive and normative and terribly careful to label which is which. The unifying theme of Ned's work is public policy, rather than any single field or small subset of fields, or method or small subset of methods. Ned himself belongs in any who's who among applied economists in the last 40 years. But even more important, his CV raised like a what's what of the important problems in public policy economics of those 40 years. Animating the work is an abiding faith that economic analysis has something useful in the world and about almost any consequential problem in public policy. Taking this as a positive assertion economics is almost always useful leads to the normative one it is the duty of the economists to apply economics to the problems of the day. This is a duty that Ned has fulfilled for 40 years in 12 books, 100 odd papers and reports, testimony, teaching and commentaries to numerous to count. Moreover throughout his career he has been willing to learn new techniques in order to get the job done. Here's the what's what of policy economics, a much broader field than economic policy that Ned has shaped. In the 1960s back when the economic stabilization was the problem of the day there was the Fed-MIT model which is the topic of Ned's first papers. The theme of stabilization policy and broad macroeconomic policy and its effects on performance in both the short and long term continues throughout Ned's work. The relationships among levels of government and within levels of government, federalism generally and fiscal federalism in particular have occupied Ned from the beginning of his professional career. His first paper on the subject takes a macroeconomic perspective. The state and local sector is large and we need to understand its relationship to the economy. But then Ned got interested and state interested in state and local governments in their own right. The model for thinking about intergovernmental grants that Ned developed in the late 1960s is still taught in public economics courses around the world. What Ned has written about fiscal federalism could fill a book and it has a rather fat one with the title Financing Federal Systems, the selected essays of Edward M. Gramlich. And when New York City's fiscal crisis hit the news in the 1970s, who better to sort it out than Ned Gramlich who could combine macroe and state and local public economics and whose American economic review paper was widely reprinted? By the way that was his job market at Michigan with happy results for me and my colleagues, among many others. Pick a major area of social and economic policy and there's a body of work by Ned Gramlich. Unemployment, social experiments, public sector employment and social choice, income distribution programs in general, the minimum wage in particular, tax limitation, the demand for public goods and services, welfare both as we know it and as we knew it, the tax reform act of 1986, the consequences of budget deficits in five different decades, the performance of teachers, education, finance, social security, subprime mortgages. To have commented wisely on the problems of the day over so many days is a remarkable achievement. To have written what is often the first intelligible paper on a real world problem after real world problem after real world problem setting the model for work that followed is extraordinary. To have been right, consistently, almost all of the time such a variety of issues is astonishing. It has been my privilege and pleasure to work with Ned on perhaps a dozen projects over the years. He is both a wonderful and a difficult co-author. Wonderful because he is full of good ideas and always willing to do more than his share. Difficult because his idea of a successful project is one that is finished. Whereas some of us like to mull things over even let things rest for a day or a week. This is actually not possible when working with Ned. If he is responsible for section two and I am responsible for section three and we agree to exchange drafts on Wednesday, there is a draft of section two on my desk on Monday and very likely a draft of section three on my desk by Tuesday. Part of the reason that Ned works so quickly is that he says things only once with the result that his work is rather terse. Where I would want to repeat something towards the end of a paper under the realistic assumption that the reader would either have skipped over it or forgotten it, Ned would credit the reader with the most powerful powers of concentration. We said it on page four and that should be good enough. I conjecture that our joint work has more information per page than work that I have done without Ned and less work and less than work that he has done without me. On this occasion I get to repeat myself. I said at the outset that Ned is always careful to separate the positive from the normative. He is scrupulous about keeping the analysis clean but it's clear that the motivation for his work is about policy. How can we make the world work better? What should we be doing to advance the public good? What we should be doing is applying what might be called the Gramlich theorem of policy economics. There are problems out there. The intelligent and creative application of economics to those problems will yield understanding and provide direction for policy. It follows that we should engage in the intelligent and creative application of economics. This is exactly what Ned Gramlich is doing for 40 years. Hi I'm Jim Levinson. I'm an economist at the University of Michigan where I have positions in the Department of Economics and in the Ford School of Public Policy. I've known Ned since I arrived at the University of Michigan exactly 20 years ago. He was doing one of his several stints in D.C. when I arrived but Ruth, if memory served, was up the road as we both lived on Morton Avenue at that time. Over the years Ned has been running the show in various capacities throughout my career. He did a term or two as chair of the Economics Department and he was of course the director and first dean of the Ford School of Public Policy. Ned's been a mentor to me over the years and I've picked up three key lessons as a result. Taken together they could comprise a decent primer on how to be an economist. And all of these lessons reflect on Ned since as we all know Ned leads by example. First, early on I got the message to try to work on issues that seem like they matter. Ned's written a gazillion papers but I can't think of one that would qualify as a purely academic in the worst sense of the word exercise. Ned has worked on the big picture issues, the future of social security, what assistance to give the U.S. airlines in the wake of 9-11, fair lending and housing practices and of course, parody in major league baseball. The focus on policy issues has I hope rubbed off a bit. One clearly doesn't come out of grad school thinking about these issues. Rather one comes out trying to figure out how to crank out a bunch of papers and so what if no one's going to actually read them so long as they get published. Again, leading by example as well as the occasional chat, Ned has shown me that one can have a successful career without specializing just too narrowly. How successful? Well Ned has his own economist trading card. That's how successful. Indeed, Ned's tackled a stunningly wide variety of issues. If you can tell me what ties together airplanes, baseball, social security and housing lending then let me know. Second, Ned has helped me navigate the economics profession. Here too he's led by example. Even keeled is the phrase that comes to mind. This economics profession it can be sort of wacky. What passes for normal is at times pretty scary but Ned has helped us back a bit. But Ned has helped me keep this in perspective. Recently I was at a meeting with a head of state and a half a dozen economists. Pretty famous folks, all. Each of the economists was trying really hard to make the case that their policy idea was the really important one. It was getting crazy. Sort of like watching a bunch of kids except these were all tenured professors at prestigious universities. I remember sitting there and asking myself what would Ned do in this situation? And the answer of course is to sit quietly and eventually make a reasoned case for the policy he thinks is the best one. In a profession where egos are not in short supply Ned has shown me that one can thrive without one. I know I fall short but knowing that it's doable that helps. When things have gone well suddenly Ned's been there to offer congratulations. But when things have gone poorly he's been there every time to buck me up. That too is part of being even killed in a profession that has its ups and downs. And where did I get all this good advice? Truth be told it was walking two umpteen University of Michigan basketball games. It's a pretty long walk from Morton Avenue to Chrysler Arena or from Rose Avenue to Clark when the weather was lousy as it usually is in Ann Arbor in February. Those walks to the games that's where I got all the good advice. And the walks home those were reserved for dissecting why you of them fell apart in the second half as they typically did. And let me tell you Ned knows basketball almost as well as he knows economics. I said there were three lessons. The third thing I've picked up from Ned is the importance of a clean desk. In Lorch Hall his desk was always clear. Same at the Fed when I visited him there. I have no idea how much truly important stuff I've inadvertently thrown away while I was doing a stint as chair of economics or while I did four years as the associate dean at the Ford School. I do know it was a hell of a lot and that too has been part of Ned's mentoring. Thanks. My name is Kristin Sefelt and I'm a researcher and assistant director of the National Poverty Center at the Ford School. I first met Ned in 1994 when I arrived at the University of Michigan to start the Masters in Public Policy program. And it's Ned's role as a teacher and a mentor that I want to discuss with my remarks. For many years nearly all students passing through the policy program encountered Ned in the classroom in the benefits course or because they used his book A Guide to Benefit Cost Analysis in the required class of the same name. In fact, many students often wondered if the decision to purchase this rather small but expensive book was their first exercise in benefit cost analyses. However, it's a testament to the staying power of Ned's work that not only has this book been reprinted, it's also one of the few books from graduate school that allows many MPP alums. Many MPP students at Michigan have been fortunate enough to take a class from Ned. His macroeconomics class was extremely popular with all 70 seats in the classroom filled. Ned conveyed the ins and outs of monetary and fiscal policy using examples from his days at the Congressional Budget Office making abstract concepts real and compelling. Ned's commitment to teaching was strong. In the program, Ned was director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies and was working to transition the program into the School of Public Policy an effort that no doubt required many meetings and much additional work. Yet, Ned continued to teach us in the classroom twice a week and often provided additional time for smaller group meetings. But Ned was not just interested in making sure students understood macroeconomics and cost benefit analysis. He also sought out opportunities for real personal connections. Although his class was large and had two graduate students assigned to it, he always held his own office hours and he maintained an open door policy for students who had questions. He also knew all our names. And Ned and Ruth typically hosted the last class of the term in their homes. A very generous gesture on their part. Over the years, I've watched Ned interact with many Michigan alums asking, what's new? These conversations often led to different ways of thinking about the issues that we were grappling within our current jobs. I was recently the beneficiary of such an encounter. Running into Ned in the bus stop and being asked, what's new resulted in Ned giving an impromptu lecture on subprime mortgage rates and the effects of foreclosures on neighborhoods to myself and a group of mostly qualitative researchers. Ultimately, he helped me launch a new direction for one of my research projects. I'm grateful for Ned's interest in our work and our careers long after we left the classroom. On behalf of those whom you've taught and mentored we are honored to have learned from you. I'm John Chamberlain, faculty member at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy where I've been a colleague and a friend of Ned's since he joined the Public Policy Faculty in 1976. All of us in the school have benefited enormously from Ned's presence among us for 30 years as a colleague, teacher and leader. As director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies and as the first dean of the School of Public Policy he provided both intellectual and institutional leadership that built the foundation on which the current school stands. Ned was also a vital force in nurturing and sustaining the sense of community that made the Public Policy Program at Michigan a wonderful place to be a faculty member or a student. Ned's course on benefit cost analysis was at the heart of our curriculum. All of our students took it and they all took away from it a personal attachment to Ned that continues to this day. Ned's good, humor response to being the target of many skips at holiday parties endeared him to students and set a tone that nourished the sense of community we treasure here in the school. I don't think there was ever a student faculty invent involving a ball that Ned didn't participate in and everyone soon learned that regardless of the game you are better off having Ned on your side. Ned is my idea of a public policy faculty member. He's done a wide range of outstanding work in his discipline, opening up new avenues of economic research, always attuned to important policy problems. But he has been equally active in public life in ways that joined his academic knowledge and insight with the policy world. Before he came to Michigan he worked at OEO and Brookings producing work that regularly found its way into our curriculum. Later he spent two years at the Congressional Budget Office chaired the Quadrennial Advisory Committee on Social Security and topped it all off with his appointment as a governor of the Federal Reserve System. Along the way he served as staff director of Major League Baseball's Economic Study Committee the assignment I envied most. In all of these instances Ned set a wonderful example for his colleagues and his students. He tackled important policy problems and he demonstrated over and over again that outstanding policy analysis rooted in economics but sensitive to the broad range of forces shaping public policy could make a difference that affected the lives of millions. As a teacher he cared deeply about his students and the commitments they were making to careers in public affairs. As a colleague and leader he was inquisitive, supportive and committed to the mission of the school as a locus of broad ranging social science inquiry on the important matters facing our society. As a friend he has been all this and more. I'm Rebecca Blank. I'm the Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy here at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Ned has a long history with this institution both with the university and with the Ford School. He came here as a faculty member in the early 1970s and served as director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies between 1979 and 1983. He came back again as director for IPS but 1991 and at that point left an indelible legacy for this particular institution. It was between 1991 and 1994 that Ned worked tirelessly to make this place a school. From the stories I've heard this took a lot of memos, a lot of conversations and probably a lot of politicking. Now for those of you who are not at the university the difference between being the Institute for Public Policy Studies and the Institute for Public Policy may not seem very much but in reality being a school makes this place one of 18 schools and colleges at the university. It gives us longevity, it gives us central support and it gives us a great deal of visibility and presence here on campus. It's really Ned's work that we became a school and then later in 2000 became the Gerald R. Ford School. So he really is the founding father of this particular institution and his current incarnation. Indeed in 1995 he went from being director of IPS to being the very first dean of the school and served in that position until 1997 when he went off to the Federal Reserve Board. We tried to bring him back in the mid-2000s when he left the Federal Reserve but unfortunately he was so good that rather than coming back here the university hired him to be provost and I know other people are going to talk about his contribution in that role but we've unfortunately never been able to learn back onto the full-time faculty but people here certainly would have loved to have had him come back and at the same time we were delighted to have him here as provost. So I walked into this job a year and a half or so after Ned had left and in fact I knew Ned during his first couple of years in D.C. since I was on the Council of Economic Advisors and we would get together about once a month. I really got to understand Ned though in absentia coming into this position. I walked into the dean's job and if you know Ned at all the first thing that you'll know is that there was not a single piece of paper anywhere in my office in any way, shape or form involving any history of this place. Ned threw it all away. He worked with it and he pitched it. So I sort of had to call him ever so often and say, Ned do you remember anything about this? But if he didn't leave me paper he left quite a bit of other things here in terms of a legacy. One of the ways to judge the legacy of someone is both what do their colleagues think of them and what do their students think of them. And by those two measures Ned was really a winner. Again I followed Ned and I wasn't here when he was a colleague but to this very day I still hear from his colleagues Ned stories, conversations simply the comment, gosh we wish Ned were here he'd have enjoyed this. It's clear that he's a real presence here and that his colleagues think of him on a daily basis as someone who's really part of this place. I certainly know that he left a community here of scholars who work together who think well of each other who know how to work together and that's a legacy that anyone would be delighted to follow and it's really due to his leadership that it's here. Secondly Ned left a legacy with his students. I've been to a lot of alumni events and I've talked to a lot of students and again I've heard a lot of Ned stories and what comes through again and again is how much students learned from Ned how much they respected him felt from him his own sense of public service and how much that instilled in them a real sense of public service in their own lives, in their own careers. Ned, the Ford School really is a legacy that is going to outlive you and outlive me for a long time to come. It is something that you have shaped and created here and I hope it's something that you are proud of. Your colleagues, your students and indeed this very institution have a great presence and appreciate the time that you spent here. Hi, I'm Marvin Krizlov. I'm the Vice President and General Counsel at the University of Michigan and I'm soon leaving to become the President of Oberlin College. Ned and I got to know each other when he was the Provost at this university and I had heard about him from my sister-in-law who had worked with him in low-income housing and told me what a fine person and what a great leader he was and so quickly I would feel very close to him and very inspired by him. He, I think it's fair to say was like a father to me in some ways in the way he helped mentor me and particularly in working through a difficult issue involving sponsorship of a data research project and what was distinctive about Ned was that he commanded the respect of everyone involved in the negotiations and they were quite difficult negotiations with multiple parties and there were a lot of sensitivities and Ned was just incredible in the way that he dealt with dignity with everyone and was very clear and forthright and at the end of the day we got what was a very positive outcome for both the university and for the party that we ended up working with but it was that sense of decency that integrity that I came to rely on and one of the things that was distinctive about Ned is that at executive officer meetings many people would duck if there was something that didn't look like it had gone particularly well and Ned was completely different Ned would always say well, I guess that was my responsibility and I need to go back and work on that and that was just always a hallmark of the way Ned was as provost he would take responsibility if there was a problem he would fix the problem he would own up to it and he would always deal with people very candidly and with great integrity which is the word that I keep thinking of when I think of Ned I think others probably have talked about his vision others have talked about his seeing the future in terms of universities and budgets but I guess that I would say that my overwhelming experience with him as provost and as a friend is just this sense of decency and honesty and complete lack of ego when it comes to trying to do the right thing and that's why he is the quintessential Michigan man in my view and he has left wonderful friends here and he knows that and Ned and Ruth you know that Amy and I have enjoyed the times that we've spent together and we commend Ned on his many many years of service to this institution and to this country I am really happy to be able to talk to you I hope I can talk to you in person for my email but you know I've been thinking when I was asked to speak about you Ned about all the good times we've had and kind of my wonderful memories in your role as provost at the University of Michigan and of course most of what you and I know that we shared and laughed about could never be repeated in public or certainly on a CD or something that could end up who knows where but I do know there are some things that I can say wherever it gets and that is you did such a great job as provost and I know that the executive officers, the deans, the regents so enjoyed your tenure as provost and I know I personally really enjoyed it I'm not sure I'll ever have as much fun as I did when you were in the role and I think you know one of the reasons a major reason is because you have such a great sense of humor and I think I do and we both knew that one of the situations we had to deal with really required a sense of humor and if you didn't have it you weren't going to survive I remember vividly one of my first interactions with you you must have been a provost for a day, a week you called me on a Friday night I was just gotten home, it was about 6 o'clock I was just changing into my weekend attire as up in the bedroom my cell phone rang so I went running to the cell phone and I remember vividly a discussion let's just say a project that you thought was really kind of a no brainer a way to refund a research project in ISR and it was pretty much a slam dunk you were enthusiastic I said it sounds great you said well let me, can I talk to the board and I said it sounds great to me well little did I know that when you said you were going to talk to the board you were going to start talking to people immediately and the next day was a home football game I remember it well I was at the tailgate with hundreds of people and by the time I got there half hour late you had already talked to at least half the board about your project, cornered them probably got, if you had talked to four regions at least four different opinions by early the next week you would talk to all of them or perhaps by half time at a football game had at least eight different opinions by then if not ten and I think what you thought was going to be a two hour project kind of a slam dunk we're going to do this it's great became a project through the duration of your term as provost as you know all too well the subject of many informal discussions many one on one conversations conversations with lawyers back and forth ad infinitum and I think it was toward one of your last days in your ten year as provost that that two hour project finally was wrapped up and with great success not precisely I think as you had anticipated it would at the beginning but all in good and due course I also really enjoyed our one on one meetings with you know the secretary and provost meetings to plan the region's agenda and more important to me and maybe to you and to our mental health the sidebar conversations we would have about some of the interesting characters and situations we had to deal with together and individually and some of the nuttiness frankly about you know what we what we do that was always the most fun and a great release because when you kind of get beat up all day or all week and then you can get together and sort of laugh about it and put it in a different perspective that was always helpful to me anyway and hopefully to you you know the board loved you and to a one you got along so well with everyone on the board which is not something you can say about most people given the political diversity and different personalities and so on but I remember one meeting this is just one minor anecdote but we were at a meeting and of course we were running late and you know it was an informal session and you know it was disorganized you know going off in different directions and then somebody turned to you the chair or someone of the board and said alright now come on let's get to your agenda topic and you in a totally rude and obnoxious way said something like well hey don't blame me you know I know how to run a meeting but you guys obviously don't you don't show up on time you can't stick to an agenda it was great but what you don't know is maybe two things one is you're about the only person I know who could get away with saying something like that maybe the only ever or maybe ever in the future and the other thing is I was sitting at the other end of the table when you said it and I think everybody's jaws dropped when you said it you were so curt and you know impetuous and just wanting to you know get the meeting going and come on people but one of the regions at my end of the table who is very fond of you as they all are leaned over to our end of the table she put her hand down she said don't you just love this guy I mean I guess they like the abuse I don't know but it worked somehow on a slightly more serious note I do think and I think many people feel that you had many many legacies as provost at Michigan in your short tenure as provost but I think that the one that is really most outstanding and will be remembered for many many years and will is really set a precedent for many years to come is the financial planning retreat that you organized that you did a ton of work for in December I think it was January of your year or so as provost and that was a really good retreat and in fact has become I guess I'll there say a custom now our practice that they have come to depend on as an opportunity to really think long-term big picture about the financial viability and health and future of this great public institution and you know you just did such a fabulous job and I think as an economist it was such a great you know credentials and reputation that you just had such a great influence on that discussion or even having the discussion and setting that up is something that this board really ought to do into the future so I want to thank you for that and I do think that will be one of your major legacies finally kind of the last thing I just want to mention is that I'm really glad that you and Ruth and all your kids and grandkids came to the Alamo Bowl and you know that I was there with my kids and it was a great it was a great trip for us and I think for your family until the game or maybe the last minute of the game or the last few seconds but I'm really glad you were able to do that and I just want you to know that we went to the Rose Bowl this past year and took my kids and my son is convinced that the Alamo Bowl is much better and so you picked the right trip to go to take care Ned thanks Hi I'm Ken Wade CEO of NeighborWorks America and I'm pleased to be able to be here to talk about some of the contributions that Ned Gramlich has made I met Ned in 1999 when he became a board member of NeighborWorks America in his role as a Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve and we're somewhat unique in that the Board of Governors of the Fed have a seat on our board of bank regulators and we like to say that many of them come to Washington DC they get this very prestigious appointment and when they get here in Washington they're also told oh and by the way you're on the board of NeighborWorks America and I'm sure Ned had that initial reaction as well as most of our board members do what is NeighborWorks America and and why am I chosen or slated to be on that board but I think shortly after Ned was selected to be the Fed representative on our board he did learn that there was a family connection actually that he shared with us as an institution and Ned shared with us that his father actually had been a board member and volunteer at our affiliate in Rochester, New York and I think as many of you know that's where Ned is from so it's been great having Ned as a board member he served on our board from 1999 to 2005 and from 2001 until 2005 he served as the chair of our board during that time under Ned's leadership he was instrumental in helping shape the success and the strategic vision of our organization and let me just share a few of the highlights from Ned's contribution number one in 2001 the first year he became chair the NeighborWorks Network leveraged more than $1.4 billion of investments in lower income communities and that represented a 9% increase over the previous year so Ned was right there at the beginning in his leadership role helping us ramp up the contributions that we were making in 2003 we extended the corporations campaign for home ownership and worked with the president's minority home ownership initiative that was designed to close the home ownership gap between minorities and whites and our campaign is the largest national initiative of its kind designed to help reduce the racial disparities in home ownership Ned also presided over our 25th anniversary in 2003 the organization was created in 1878 and Ned was fortunate to be our chair during that period and in 2004 under Ned's leadership we launched the NeighborWorks Center for Home Ownership Education and Counseling and this year the NeighborWorks Center for Home Ownership Education and Counseling released its national standards which are setting the standards for quality and consistency across the industry for home buyer education and counseling in addition through Ned's leadership we also in 2004 launched our national center for foreclosure solutions and when you think about it Ned was very supportive of that effort and one of the board members who took a very significant interest in that work and when you think about it that was quite visionary when you look at what's happening in the market today so in addition Ned was always ready of his very busy schedule to visit local affiliates whenever he had a chance he logged more miles than any other board member in getting out to see the work firsthand in all sorts of communities throughout America including a trip to our affiliate in Hawaii where in Ned's words they made him wear that silly Hawaiian shirt and all Ned was a great board member and a board chair we're grateful for his commitment to NeighborWorks America which has made a lasting impact not only on the corporation's work but also in countless lower income communities around the country I'm Bob Reichauer president of the Urban Institute where Ned Gramlich is currently the Richard B. Fisher senior fellow and has been in that role since August of 2006 but Ned and I go back much longer both as friends and on again, off again colleagues at various organizations we first became friends in 1973 when we were both members of the economic studies staff at the Brookings Institution looking back over the last 34 years two things stand out the first of these is Ned's intellectual versatility and the wide range of professional expertise that he has developed Ned in many ways is to the world of public policy what an Olympic gold medal the Catholic is to the world of sports he's filled a wide variety of roles all of which have been very challenging and he has performed in each of those roles at the very highest of levels making significant contributions to each of the organizations of which he has been a part policy analyst primarily at the Brookings Institution and at the Urban Institute he's been an academic economist at Michigan both as a professor and a department chair he's been an academic leader as provost, as institute director as a dean at Michigan and he's been a central banker with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve he's been important leader at several government agencies as the director of research at the Office of Economic Opportunity and where I care the most as the deputy director and the acting director for some very critical periods at the Congressional Budget Office he's been an important shaper of policy as a chair or a member of numerous government and private commissions commissions that have dealt with a very, very wide spectrum of issues ranging from social security to baseball to housing to the future of the airline industry he's been a very influential author with a long list of first-rate books and journal articles to his credit works that are balanced that are methodologically sophisticated and most importantly that are readable to the average person interested in public policy it's not a difficult thing to explain why what Ned has written has influenced so many different policy debates and certainly the latest of his contributions illustrates all of this only too well and that is the Urban Institute book that he's just written on the subprime mortgage market balanced showing the pluses and the minuses of the experience that this nation has been through any one of these roles would have constituted a pretty remarkable career for most ambitious policy analysts in Washington but Ned has been in them all and done exceptionally well the second thing that really stands out about Ned is really best described by the reactions that I received from the staff of the Urban Institute when Ned joined us a year ago in August 2006 very few people on the staff knew Ned personally but his reputation was known by all they realized that this was a really highly successful top of the game policy analyst who they all looked up to for the first month that Ned was at the institute I had staff members almost every day coming up to me sticking their head in my office people who were vice presidents people who were senior researchers research assistants, secretaries people on the administrative staff people at all levels and they had one reaction to Ned who they had been anticipating coming on board for over a year but it was a little bit delayed because he went to Michigan to fill in the provost's role and this one reaction was gosh, Ned Gramlich is a really nice guy he seems to be interested in what I'm doing he seems to be curious about virtually everything related to public policy and to just general happenings in the world at large he is helpful he's generous with his time he's relatively low-key he seems to be unflappable he seems to be so polite in a town where most of the people who are extremely successful have some sharp elbows and edge to their behavior a shortness when they're dealing with others who can't help to pave the way to the top Ned really stands out as a wonderful individual somebody who is exceptional in the humanity with which he deals with everybody somebody who virtually everybody would say boy, I'd like to be that person's friend and I find myself extremely fortunate in that I've been able to say I've been a good friend of Ned Gramlich we've shared a lot of laughs we've shared some good discussions about public policy we've shared some gnashing of teeth over political developments in this country and we've had this relationship for three and a half decades and for that I'm wonderfully grateful I'm Rudy Penner a colleague of Ned's from the Urban Institute however we've had many contacts and different kinds of relationships over the years the first one was when I was at the Council of Economic Advisors whether I'd be interested in moving to OEO I wasn't and it was a good thing because the place went out of business very quickly but our most important relationship was at the Congressional Budget Office in my second year there my deputy Eric Anishek decided to go back to academic life and he mentioned that Ned might be interested in the deputy job I was skeptical because I didn't think anyone as good as Ned that he'd be interested in being a deputy but we had some brief conversations and he was very eager and I was of course delighted that he took the job I was the second director of CBO Alice Rivlin was the first and she did a magnificent job of establishing the institution but I was a little nervous I wasn't sure that it would endure it was vitally important to maintain high quality and Ned was in charge of quality control he did it with persuasiveness he sometimes had to criticize partially some drafts of reports but he never raised the hackles of the staff indeed they regarded him with great respect and affection when it came time for me to leave I thought that it would provide an incentive to the Congress to appoint someone quickly if I left the premises soon after my term ended unfortunately I was wrong the Congress procrastinated Ned had to take over as acting director I don't think it's ever easy to be acting anything because you have all the responsibility without having complete authority but Ned did the job extraordinarily well he kept CBO operating as usual at a very high level of quality throughout his career at CBO and in other of his professional positions Ned has always been an advocate of fiscal responsibility this is the one area of his professional career where he's failed miserably alas the budget deficit goes on and doesn't look like it's going away I've known Ned personally for quite a few years now but we grew especially close through three interactions more recently in each of these what has stood out so clearly has been Ned's extraordinary ability to seek out the right answers or approaches to public policy his unique ability among researchers to let his modesty work in his favor by recognizing where our knowledge was limited and finally his overall balance you know the Greeks held that balance was among the most essential of all elements that it led to justice and it led to harmony in society Ned stands out as much as a political philosopher to me as an economist now one major interaction with Ned was when he served as chair of the advisory commission on social security between 1994 and 1996 some people remember this panel because of the divergence of views between the two camps those who wanted to basically keep the system as it was and those who wanted to do a major conversion of it into a personal account system Ned continually tried to strike a balance and he proposed and promoted a third way now he only got one vote besides himself for this third way but the other two approaches while they were often creative intellectually rigorous at some level at other times they just failed because they didn't achieve balance and I can tell you that to this day most people believe that it's the Gramlich approach to social security reform that's going to win out in the end what I remember also from this interaction though is that Ned just wanted to find out the right answer he had no arrogance about it he had no problem asking people questions he had no issue learning something new or changing his mind about different issues he did not have a preconceived notion of what he wanted to achieve other than he wanted to serve the public with the best possible social security system that we could have a second source of interaction was when we worked together on a book called The Government We Deserve Ned led the work on examining issues having to do with income distribution and three others of us led on some other chapters now the story on income distribution is actually much more complicated I actually tell and the historical changes are actually somewhat complex Ned was able to take this story and weave it in a way that it was understandable but yet without dodging the intricacies he didn't take the shortcuts again what we saw in all of his work was just this extraordinary balance and finally a most recent interaction with Ned has been since he's joined the Urban Institute very recently in 2006 Ned immediately jumped into an effort we had underway in studying asset development especially for low and moderate income people and he stood out once again in terms of his thoughtfulness his eagerness to tackle new problems and his wisdom and in fact this is shown in one of his major outputs which came about very quickly which is a book on subprime mortgages that was published in July of 2007 I want to relate one conversation that I had with Ned that I've never forgotten about the appropriateness of different levels of learning such as getting a PhD or the level of academic research necessary to do good public policy Ned made it very clear that he felt that for many jobs a PhD was not appropriate that in public policy the goal was to get the right answer for the public and that the goal in academia was often to prove that you've been creative or original even if it sometimes led to wrong conclusions he just cared about getting the right answer the bottom line Ned is just one absolutely terrific person he's balanced and insightful as they come and it's a privilege to join in this tribute to his lifetime professional accomplishments my name is David Wilcox I'm an economist at the Federal Reserve Board I got to know Ned when he joined the Federal Reserve as a member of the Board of Governors in 1997 at that time I had in fact left the board to join the Treasury Department on the hope and understanding that the administration would take a very serious run at performing the social security system and that I would be part of the team that would participate in that effort one of the first documents that we assigned ourselves to study in order to bone up on the analytics of social security reform was the report of the advisory council that Ned chaired and that had published its report in the previous year that report was tremendously influential in forming our thinking about the various possible options and what the underlying analytics were some years later after I had returned to the board I was having a conversation with Ned about social security reform and I underscored how helpful my colleagues and I had found the council's report I remember very clearly Ned expressing some regret that the council had not been able to come to consensus and put out a single reform proposal but I said then and I still firmly believe now that the council in fact performed a far greater service by laying out three fully articulated and very different approaches to social security reform and in that approach I think they made a far greater contribution to the ultimate cause of social security reform than they would have if they had somehow managed to forge a single unified proposal I still believe that when the nation comes back to social security reform as inevitably we must the report of the Gramlich advisory council will be one of the key source documents that future staffers will study and that the plan that is ultimately adopted will probably bear a very close resemblance to the one that Ned put forward in that report three weeks from tomorrow I will have the privilege of reading on his behalf the keynote address that Ned was scheduled to deliver at the Federal Reserve's annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this will be one of the greatest honors of my life and I'm immensely proud to do it on behalf of one of the very rare economists who has the eyes to recognize what is around him, the mind to analyze what he sees with rigor and honesty and the heart to encourage all of the rest of us to do something about it My name is Dan Sickle I'm a deputy associate director at the Federal Reserve Board so I met Ned first in 1981 when I was a public policy program at the University of Michigan then known as Ips, now known as the Ford School I actually knew of him from long before that. His family lived just two blocks up the street from where I grew up in Ann Arbor and my older brother also was a student at Ips so I had heard Ned's stories for a good number of years At Ips, Ned quickly became a role model for me when I was a student there I was terrifically impressed by his sharp intellect his powerful ability to focus on what's important, his passion for making the world a better place and his really fun, self-deprecating sense of humor. He's one of the rare people I've known about whom I always thought I want to think like that person thinks One of the most important things he did for me at Michigan was persuade me to go on to economics graduate school and save me from going to law school I have a very vivid memory of a conversation with Ned in his office at Rackham at Michigan and at the beginning of the conversation I was law school bound and at the end of the conversation I was economics graduate school bound I know Ned also had a powerful influence on the careers and lives of many other students at Michigan So our professional lives crossed again when Ned came to the Fed as a governor where I'm an economist After September 11th, Ned became the chair of the airline loan board set up by the Congress to grant loan guarantees to airlines that had suffered losses and increased interest attacks I was the Fed economist assigned to work with Ned in his role as chairman and it was a wild ride at the beginning there was considerable uncertainty about whether a number of airlines would fail and a lot of folks expected that the loan board would just shovel money out to the airlines in a sense the loan board became one of the central features of the airline industry for a period of a year or two when the board was first set up So Ned handled the substantive political aspects of this job in a masterful way always maintaining focus on the key substantive issues despite the considerable political noise in the background Perhaps the most momentous event and certainly one of the most interesting for the airline loan board was United's application for a loan guarantee Despite all sorts of craziness surrounding this issue including not so subtle political pressure to approve United's application from Treasury Secretary Snow and Speaker of the House Hastert Ned ultimately prevailed and the application was turned down and in part he did this by persuading the member of the board from the Treasury department to vote against his own secretary in the Treasury department it was really extraordinary So Ned's political skills here were sufficient to outfox the Secretary of the Treasury and the Speaker of the House and at the time many people involved were quite surprised that Ned managed to pull this off By this time I really wasn't surprised because I'd seen Ned in action enough that I knew he could pull this kind of thing off and Ned didn't just do this for the game of it for the sake of winning but he did it because of his passionate desire to ensure that public policy was focused on making the right decision rather than satisfying a particular constituency and from my experience that's a key hallmark of Ned's professional career So once again I had the chance to watch Ned and work with him from up close and once again I found myself thinking I wish I could think like he thinks. I'm Sandy Braunstein Director of the Division of Consumer and Community Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board I first met Ned Gramlich when he came to the Board of Governors as a governor in 1997 I worked with him his entire tenure in fact he's responsible for me becoming the Division Director. We worked closely together on a number of projects and he was completely dedicated to consumer protection issues. Foremost among those issues had to do with housing and at that time grave concerns about predatory lending Ned shepherded through to very important rulemaking for the Federal Reserve. One dealt with the Homeowner Equity and Protection Act HOPA or HOPA and the other one dealt with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act or HUMDA as it's referred to. These have made lasting imprints in terms of predatory lending One of the things that is most memorable about these rulemakings is Ned's personal involvement It's very unusual for governor to take that kind of hands-on approach. Normally the staff works through the package and brings it to the Board members for their sign-off. In the case of these rulemakings Ned would hold strategy sessions in his office where he would sit and talk to staff about which direction we should go and he very much led this effort and helped make the very important decisions that resulted in the rules being the way they are. As a result of these rules, we were able to stop some practices in particular with HOPA single premium credit insurance which everyone agreed was an egregious practice and the lasting impact of the HUMDA data was Ned was the one who was personally responsible for adding pricing data to HUMDA which has brought a lot of transparency to the markets. Also while Ned was at the Fed he worked very diligently on revisions to the Community Reinvestment Act and there again he personally took control of that project and in fact insisted on additional data to help make the decision which caused a great paper to be written, a bulletin article on the impacts of various decisions on the rulemaking and we did a really good thing with that rulemaking and Ned really took control of that. Additionally Ned worked with me on community development issues and one of my best memories of that is a trip that he and I took together to England and we went to London and one of the highlights of that trip was we actually had a meeting in number 10 Downing Street and I remember remarking to Ned at the time that he needed to always remember that it was community development that got him into 10 Downing Street not monetary policy. Additionally my favorite anecdote with Ned or one of them I have many is when he was for a short time Ned was administrative at the board and during this tenure we had a function in my division one night and the next day I received a call from Ned and in his way because Ned was always very nice he told me what a nice function it was and what a good time he had but he mentioned to me that he thought it was a bit tacky that we served we had a cash bar and we served where we served drinks and made bank people pay for their drinks for their glasses of wine and so I really appreciated that because that had been a long time board policy and my response to Ned was well I can't do anything about that but you're administrative governor so that's something that you could address and sure enough less than a month later we all received a revised policy so to me one of Ned's lasting legacies at the Fed is free alcohol for the reserve banks I appreciate this opportunity to say a few words about my good friend Ned Gremlich during our nine years together at the Federal Reserve Board I was impressed by many things about Ned as many have noted he is a well respected economist expert on all manner of issues from fiscal policy to social security from the structure of a discount window to the economics of baseball and countless things in between in addition to his many contributions and insights in the monetary policy arena Ned took on a number of challenging assignments during his years as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board for example he volunteered to chair the Air Transportation Stabilization Board in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9-11 in government service I can think of few tasks that are more thankless he handled it with exquisite deft in fact when faced with policy challenges more generally Ned was invariably undaunted he rolled up his sleeves and got to work he showed a deep understanding of and appreciation of for the nuances and complexities of public policymaking this was most evident for me as he led our efforts as the chairman of the board's committee on consumer affairs during that time he steered the board to make important improvements to the home mortgage disclosure act and the home ownership protection act I was touched by a line in Ned's resignation letter to the president in the summer of 2005 in it he said that his experience at the Federal Reserve was one he would treasure always indeed that word treasure is appropriate Ned is a treasure for many of us Ned Gramlich is a true gentleman his involvement in any discussion brings an immediate and palpable civilizing effect we all value Ned's keen insights, his good humor and his lively mind it was a pleasure and an honor to engage in public service with Ned and I am proud to count him as a friend I'm pleased to have the opportunity to say a few words about my good friend Ned Gramlich Ned has been a lifelong visionary who fights tirelessly for the cause of sound public policy he's a man of great intellect and integrity and he uses his abundant gifts for the betterment of a nation Ned's service at the Federal Reserve Board showcased his talents as an activist and as an advocate for those who lived outside the financial and economic mainstream he worked tirelessly to expand the protection of the law for its consumers and was a strong promoter of financial education making smart financial decisions is the way to a better life and Ned did his best to give consumers the tools and opportunities they need to navigate a complex financial landscape under Ned's able leadership the Board adopted important changes to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the Home Ownership Equity Protection Act Ned took a hands-on approach to formulating rules that shed more light on the mortgage industry by requiring lenders to report pricing data and extending the law's protection to more loans Ned navigated some difficult waters and leading the charge to streamline the Community Reinvestment Act's reporting process for intermediate-sized banks the resulting changes reduced the regulatory burden on community banks and made CRA evaluations more effective tools for encouraging banks to meet their community development needs during his tenure at the Federal Reserve Ned was actively involved with the Board's Consumer Advisory Council and demonstrated his commitment to community revitalization by serving as a chairman of the Board of the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation now NeighborWorks America Ned was the driving force behind the major restructuring of discount window lending programs implemented in 2003 The new programs were designed to enhance the effectiveness of the discount window in addressing unexpected funding shortfalls for individual depository institutions and to improve the implementation of monetary policy In the wake of the 9-11 tragedy Ned served as chairman of the Air Transportation Stabilization Board a body that oversaw the disbursement of federal loan guarantees to air carriers that suffered losses due to the terrorist attacks He brought to this post a wealth of experience from his prior service on other high-profile task forces Ned's years at the Federal Reserve coincided with some challenging times for central bankers around the globe At the FOMC table Ned could always be counted on for insightful and thought-provoking commentary His approach to policymaking was straightforward and based on rigorous analysis He was well respected by his colleagues for his intellect and collegial manner Above all, Ned is a teacher He taught those of us who were fortunate enough to work alongside him the importance of looking at old problems through a new lens He's not afraid to stir things up and break from conventional wisdom He does so with good humor and a sense of purpose that is born of a genuine desire to do the right thing On a personal note, Ned is a man of great warmth and great wit His kindness and respect for the views of others are legendary I am honored to call him my friend As we reflect on this remarkable career we are grateful for the countless contributions Ned has made as a consummate public servant