Emily Eisenlohr is a financial analyst, specializing in credit analysis and policy advocacy. She is the author of Fairy Tale Capitalism: Fact and Fiction Behind Too Big To Fail, which chronicles how the biggest banks' creation of a financial superhighway of risk led to the financial bubble, with lots of help from Congress, the rating agencies and the regulators.
She spent two decades in the rapidly evolving financial sector. She remains eternally thankful for her acceptance in 1980 into the First Scholar management training program at the First National Bank of Chicago (now a part of JPMorgan Chase), which gave her exposure to trading floors, commercial lending, retail credit products and institutional investments over the 2 1/2 years it took to get her MBA at night. Her experience and expertise continued to expand at Citibank (now a part of Citigroup) as a corporate banking executive in the multinational and national banking areas and as a credit training developer and instructor. She spent over five years in the electric industry ratings practice, primarily as a Senior Credit Officer, at Moody's Investors Service, resigning in October 2000 from both the rating agency and a two-hour commute to raise her son.
Education in all its avenues has been and will remain one of her other passions. It is the lifeblood of small-d democratic capitalism.
Drawn to the college by its strength in the sciences, she received a B.A. cum laude from Mount Holyoke College in 1974. She earned an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1982 and the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation in 1994. Pursuing music degrees from Northwestern University and a German state music academy in the 1970s enriched her career and her life.