Hollywood on the Heights
Director Ron Howard headlines the 18th annual Finance Conference.
The 19th Annual Finance Conference
Hosted by the Seidner Department of Finance
Perhaps more than ever, foreign relations are anything but foreign for investors and the US economy in general. Against the backdrop of wars, tariffs, and other disruptions affecting portfolios and pocketbooks at home, attendees of the 2026 Finance Conference on May 1 will hear from prominent experts and scholars well-equipped to make sense of it all.
Among the headline speakers will be former US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns ‘78, along with Nobel Prize-winning economist and Seidner University Professor Paul Romer. The by-invitation-only conference is hosted by the Seidner Department of Finance at the Boston College Carroll School of Management.
Videos of the sessions will be posted on this page in the aftermath of the conference.
Featured Speakers
Nicholas Burns ’78, H ’02, P ’09, ’12
Burns is the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. There, he is the Founder and Faculty Chair of the Future of Diplomacy Project, as well as a Faculty Affiliate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Burns served as the US Ambassador to the People's Republic of China from 2021-2025, leading public servants from 48 US government agencies at the US mission to China and overseeing one of America's most important and challenging bilateral relationships. During his tenure, he helped to stabilize relations with Beijing while competing with China on military, technology, economic, and human rights issues. He has a BA in history from Boston College (1978) and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (1980).
Paul Romer
Romer is the Seidner University Professor, teaching in the Carroll School of Management’s Seidner Department of Finance, and founding director of the Center for the Economics of Ideas at the Carroll School. He is also a recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics; he received the prize for showing how different it is when an economy produces and distributes not just physical objects but also ideas. With the right policies, ideas make progress possible. With policies blindly extrapolated from the analysis of objects, ideas can yield stagnation or regress. Romer received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has taught at NYU, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, and Rochester. He also founded Aplia, an education technology company.
Richard Bernstein
Bernstein is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer of Richard Bernstein Advisors LLC. As CIO, he is a member of the firm’s Investment Committee, which manages multi-asset, global equity, and fixed income ETF strategies for financial advisors and institutions. He writes the firm’s monthly Insights, which has over 25,000 subscribers, is a frequent guest on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, and is a recurring opinion contributor for Financial Times. Bernstein has over 40 years’ experience on Wall Street and was formerly the Chief Investment Strategist at Merrill Lynch & Co. Prior to joining Merrill Lynch in 1988, he held positions at E.F. Hutton and Chase Econometrics/IDC. Bernstein holds an MBA in finance from New York University and a BA in economics from Hamilton College. He has lectured on finance and economics at numerous colleges, universities, and professional forums.
Marc Seidner '88, P '24
Seidner is the CIO for Non-traditional Strategies at PIMCO and managing director in the company’s Newport Beach office. He rejoined PIMCO in November 2014 after serving as head of fixed income at GMO LLC; he was previously a PIMCO managing director, generalist portfolio manager, and member of the company’s Investment Committee. Prior to originally joining PIMCO in 2009, he was a managing director and domestic fixed income portfolio manager at Harvard Management Company. Before that, Seidner was director of active core strategies at Standish Mellon Asset Management and a senior portfolio manager at Fidelity Management and Research. Altogether, he has nearly four decades of investment experience and holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Boston College.
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Paul Schmelzing
Paul Schmelzing is Assistant Professor of Finance in the Seidner Department of Finance, concentrating on long-run asset pricing and global macro strategy. He is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and has worked at Goldman Sachs and the German Bundestag's Finance Committee. He has also held visiting positions at the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund. For the past seven years, he has been working on a book titled A New History of the International Financial System, to be released by Yale University Press. He is also a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Finance Conference Co-Chairs
Marc Seidner ’88, P ’24
Chief Investment Officer, Non-traditional Strategies
PIMCO
Daniel E. Holland III ’79, P ’07, ’08
Chief Operating Officer
Shield Capital
Jonathan Reuter
Associate Professor, Seidner Department of Finance
Carroll School of Management
Boston College
Andy Boynton ’78, P ’13
John and Linda Powers Family Dean
Carroll School of Management
Boston College
