Dennis Gartman

Editor and Publisher, The Gartman Letter

Mr. Gartman has been directly involved in the capital markets since August of 1974, after his graduate work at the North Carolina State University. He was an economist for Cotton, Inc. in the early 1970′s, analyzing cotton supply/demand in the US textile industry. From there he went to NCNB National Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina where he traded foreign exchange and money market instruments. In the late 70′s, Mr. Gartman became the Chief Financial Futures analyst for A.G. Becker & Company in Chicago, Illinois. Mr. Gartman was an independent member of the Chicago Board of Trade until 1984, trading in treasury bond, treasury note and GNMA futures contracts. In 1984, Mr. Gartman moved to Virginia to run the futures brokerage operation for the Sovran Bank, and in 1987 Mr. Gartman began producing The Gartman Letter on a full time basis. He continues to do so today.

Dan Halstrom

Dan joined USMEF in 2010 after 26 years in the meat industry with Swift & Company, which operated over the years under the names of Monfort of Colorado, ConAgra Beef Company and, finally, JBS.

Dan began his career as a management trainee for Swift Independent Packing Company at the National Stockyards Illinois Pork plant outside of St. Louis. There he learned every job in the plant from the kill floor and cut floor to fabrication, loading, rendering, freezer operations and hog procurement. He then moved into commercial sales and, ultimately, into international sales. As senior vice president of International Operations for JBS, he oversaw global beef and pork operations for the world’s largest red meat company.

Kevin Kliesen

Kevin L. Kliesen is a business economist in the Supervisory Policy and
Risk Analysis Unit at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which is located in
the Bank Supervision and Regulation Division. He came to the Bank in 1988
after graduating from Colorado State University with an M.A. in Economics. As
a business economist, the bulk of his duties comprise reporting on and analyzing
current U.S. macroeconomic developments and trends. Previously, he was part of
the Research Division.

Michael Drury

Chief Economist, McVean Trading & Investments

Michael Drury is the Chief Economist for McVean Trading & Investments, LLC. He joined the firm in 1992, after serving for five years as Vice President and Senior Economist with Allen Sinai at Shearson Lehman Brothers and his successor firm, The Boston Company Economic Advisors (both subsidies of American Express). Michael began his career in New York in 1982 as Senior Economist at A. Gary Shilling and Company. He completed his undergraduate education at the Georgia Institute of Technology and did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Michael’s primary responsibility is to develop investment strategies for futures market trading in eurodollars, currencies and industrial materials. He is the author of McVean Trading’s “Weekly Economic Update” which provides analysis of developing economic and financial trends around the world. Michael travels extensively within the United States and to China, Europe and Latin America. He has written extensively on housing and real estate, consumer spending, capital spending, fiscal policy and federal budget issues, regional economic developments, demographics, agriculture and energy. Michael has directed projects on agriculture, retailing, the auto industry, electric power, real estate and financial services. He is a board member of the Memphis Economic Club, founder and past president of the MidSouth Association for Business Economics (a chapter of NABE), a non-resident
member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, and a member of the Global Interdependence Center. Michael lives in Germantown, TN with his wife, Mahrou, and has three children.

David Pimentel

David Pimentel is a professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His Ph.D. is from Cornell University and had postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago, MIT, and fellowship at Oxford University (England). He was awarded a distinguished honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts.

C. Bailey Ragan

C. Bailey Ragan is a vice president responsible for grain, biofuels and fertilizer for Bunge North America. Mr. Ragan joined Bunge in 1981 as procurement manager at the soybean processing facility in Decatur, AL when Bunge purchased the plant from Goldkist. Within two years, he was promoted to commercial manager.

Randall W. Powell, PhD

Randall “Randy” Powell is the Program Manager for Biobased Products at BioDimensions, Inc. where he oversees the interface between agricultural production and processing of alternative crops and downstream technologies related to advanced bio fuels and green chemicals.

David E. Altig, PhD

Dr. David E. Altig is senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In addition to advising the Bank president on monetary policy and related matters, Dr. Altig oversees the Bank’s regional executives and the Bank’s research department. He also serves as a member of the Bank’s management and discount committees.

Dr. Altig also serves as an adjunct professor of economics in the graduate school of business at the University of Chicago.

Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed, Dr. Altig served as vice president and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He joined the Cleveland Fed in 1991 as an economist before being promoted in 1997. Before joining the Cleveland Fed, Dr. Altig was a faculty member in the department of business economics and public policy at Indiana University. He also has lectured at Ohio State University, Brown University, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Duke University, John Carroll University, Kent State University, and the University of Iowa, and in the Chinese Executive MBA program sponsored by the University of Minnesota and Lingnan College of Sun Yat-Sen University.

Dr. Altig’s research is primarily focused on monetary and fiscal policy issues. His articles have appeared in a variety of journals, and he has served as editor for several conference volumes on a wide range of macroeconomic and monetary-economic topics.

Dr. Altig graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from Brown University.

Michael Bryan

Mike Bryan is a vice president and senior economist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is responsible  for organizing the Atlanta Fed’s monetary policy process.

Mr. Bryan previously served as vice president in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland where he specialized in business analysis with an emphasis on measuring and tracking inflation trends. He joined the Cleveland Fed as a bank examiner in 1978 and transferred to the Research Department the next year. In 1986, Mr. Bryan served as an economist in the Research Division of the Federal Reserve System’s Board of Governors in Washington, DC. He was promoted to the position of economic adviser in 1991 and appointed as a bank officer in 1995. In 1998, he was a visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan’s Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies in Tokyo, and in 2000 he was a visiting economist at the Swedish Riksbank in Stockholm. Mr. Bryan taught in the Department of Economics at Cleveland State University and has served on the faculties of Baldwin-Wallace College and Case Western Reserve University, both in Cleveland. He joined the Atlanta Fed in 2008.

A native of Cleveland, Mr. Bryan earned a bachelor’s degree in business from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a master’s degree in economics from Case Western Reserve University.