ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Vague is currently one of the managing partners of Gabriel Investments and the Chairman of The Governor's Woods Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic organization. He is also the author of The Next Economic Disaster, a book with a new approach for predicting and preventing financial crises. Previously, he was co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Energy Plus, an electricity and natural gas supply company operating in states throughout the U.S. that was sold to NRG Energy in 2011. Vague was also co-founder and CEO of two credit card companies - First USA, which grew to be the largest Visa issuer in the industry and which was sold to Bank One in 1997, and Juniper Financial, the fastest growing credit card issuer of the past decade, which was sold to Barclays PLC in 2004.

Vague currently serves on the Penn Medicine Board of Trustees and is on the corporate boards of Heartland Payment Systems of Princeton, New Jersey, Think Direct Marketing of Tampa, Florida and GoodCents Corporation of Atlanta, Georgia.

He is president of the Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival and Chairman of the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is also on the boards of the Franklin Institute, the Museum of the American Revolution, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia and Friends of Rittenhouse Square. He serves on the Dean's Advisory Council of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy. Vague is also editor of the blog and email newsletter service Delanceyplace.com and of the website Debt-economics.org.