FROM THE OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Mr. Chairman, Senator Sarbanes, and Members of the Committee:

I am honored to appear before you today as the Presidents nominee to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions.

I am very pleased to have my wife Shirley and my son Jackson here with me today. My younger sons, Matthew and Thomas (who was born last week) are waiting at home, and my father Arthur is rooting me on from his home in Charlotte. Without their considerable support, I would have been unable to take advantage of this opportunity or weather the last few months of financial services legislation.

I am a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard Law School. After two years of litigation practice at the firm of Williams & Connolly, I spent seven years in the General Counsels office at the Federal Reserve Board, rising to the rank of managing senior counsel. At the Board, I performed a wide variety of special projects for the General Counsel, Board, and the Federal Open Market Committee. The focus of the work included legislation affecting the Board, regulatory responsibility for securities activities, inter-affiliate funding limitations, insider lending and other areas, and general troubleshooting.

For the past two years, it has been my privilege to serve at the Treasury Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy. In that position, my primary responsibility has been the financial modernization bill that the Senate passed with a strong, bipartisan vote yesterday. I have also coordinated Treasury efforts in developing the Presidents May 1999 financial privacy and consumer protection initiative, supervised Treasurys Office of Government Sponsored Enterprise Policy, and coordinated Treasurys response to the Presidential Decision Directive on critical infrastructure protection -- working to protect our financial services system from cyber attack.

If confirmed as Assistant Secretary, I hope to continue the close working relationship with this Committee that has been forged through our work on the financial services bill and other issues.

In closing, I would like to thank the President for nominating me for this position, and Secretary Summers and former Secretary Rubin for the confidence that they have placed in me. I am excited at the opportunity to continue my public service at the Treasury Department, a place where the extraordinary talents of my coworkers is a continuing source of inspiration and pride.

I now look forward to answering your questions.