FOUNDING MANAGING PARTNER, WESTWOOD CAPITAL LLC
Daniel Alpert is an American investment banker, adjunct professor and senior fellow at Cornell Law School, commentator and author. He is a co-creator of the United States Private Sector Job Quality Index, an economic metric that measures of higher wage versus lower wage private sector jobs, and the author of The Age of Oversupply: Confronting the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy. Alpert is a founding partner of Westwood Capital LLC, an investment firm based in New York, and an adviser to the Coalition for a Prosperous America. Alpert is a founder of the World Economic Roundtable program.
Alpert received a Bachelor of Arts degree in public policy from the University of Pennsylvania, and started working in commercial real estate banking and finance in 1982. He was a banker and partner at Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. before founding a New York-based investment firm, Westwood Capital, in 1995. During that time, Alpert worked on international merchant banking, bankruptcy-related restructuring transactions, commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) and mortgage REITs.
In 2010, Alpert was a featured commentator on the story of the financial crisis of 2007–08 in the documentary film Inside Job. In January 2012, he was announced as a fellow of The Century Foundation. Alpert published his first book, The Age of Oversupply: Confronting the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy, in 2013 and has been a guest commentator on business news networks and print publications.
In February 2018, Cornell Law School announced that Alpert would be a senior fellow in financial macroeconomics and an adjunct professor of law within the Clarke Program. He was also named to the advisory board of the Cornell Research Academy of Development, Law and Economics (CRADLE).
Authorship
Following the financial crisis of 2007–08, Alpert became a cited author on economic policy and the credit bubble. He started writing for Business Insider in 2011. That same year, Alpert conceived of, and co-authored along with Nouriel Roubini, New York University Professor of Economics, and Robert C. Hockett, a Professor of Financial Law at Cornell University, a widely cited and debated white paper on behalf of the New America Foundation entitled “The Way Forward” that has been credited on most sides of the macroeconomic debate with providing a clear and concise explanation of the issues that gave rise to the global financial crisis. In 2013, he released The Age of Oversupply: Confronting the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy on the effect of macroeconomic imbalances on advanced economies.
In 2016, he published the white paper GLUT: The U.S. Economy and the American Worker in the Age of Oversupply on the connection between global imbalances and United States employment, and co-authored The Debt Goes On: A Post-Crisis ‘Progress’ Report at Cornell. Alpert was a co-author and creator of the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index in 2019.
Selected publications
In 2022, during the last Congress, House Democrats passed the Import Security and Fairness Act, which would deny de minimis treatment for all Chinese merchandise.
After three years of languishing in limbo, the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), a quasi-free trade deal with more than 100 developing nations, will move out of the House Ways and Means Committee to the full House.
At a time when China continues its attempts to decimate American manufacturers and workers through predatory trade activity, Chairman Jason Smith’s leadership on trade issues has been a welcome improvement over previous chairs that have rubber stamped failed free trade programs.
USTR Katherine Tai sat for a two hours-plus hearing with the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday to discuss trade matters and was met early on by some staunch criticism.
