Key Leader Biographies:
Mark Levonian
Senior Deputy Comptroller for
International and Economic Affairs
Mark Levonian is the Senior Deputy Comptroller for International and Economic Affairs (I&EA) at the Office of the Comptroller of
the Currency (OCC).
The OCC is the supervisor of federally chartered commercial banks in the United States, and I&EA is the OCC department
responsible for delivering economic analysis to policy makers and bank supervisors.
Prior to accepting this role in November 2006, Mr. Levonian was the Deputy Comptroller for Modeling and Analysis (M&A) since
joining the agency in 2004. M&A encompasses two divisions within the OCC: the Risk Analysis Division contributes to bank
supervision by providing technical support for bank examination and policy making; the Policy Analysis Division provides
research and analysis on emerging issues of importance to the OCC, applying economic tools to a wide variety of external and
internal issues facing the agency.
Prior to joining the OCC, Mr. Levonian was vice president in Banking Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Bank of
San Francisco. In that capacity, he was a member of the Federal Reserve's Committee on Policy Development and Implementation for
banking supervision, and headed the Federal Reserve's efforts on ratings quantification for Basel II implementation.
Before becoming a bank regulator, Mr. Levonian conducted research and provided advice in banking and finance at the Federal
Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 1990 to 1997. In a previous position, he was the managing officer of the Banking Studies
Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1987-1990).
In 1992, Mr. Levonian accepted a one-year appointment as senior economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia, where he conducted
research and supported development of a framework for assessing capital for market risk at Australian banks. He has provided
technical advice to the central banks of Russia and Belarus in the areas of early identification of problem banks and regulation of
market risk, and has consulted for both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He also has taught courses in capital
markets and financial institutions at the University of California's Haas School of Business in Berkeley, has served on the faculty of
the School of Business at San Jose State University, and periodically conducts programs for the Berkeley-based Center for
Professional Development in Finance.
Mr. Levonian's personal research has resulted in a variety of publications and presentations in areas including deposit-insurance
pricing, risk modeling, residential mortgages, market discipline in banking, capital allocation techniques, agricultural lending,
banking in transition economies, and resolution of problem banks. Most recently, he has been a frequent speaker on quantification
and validation for the Basel II capital framework at industry conferences.
Mr. Levonian has a doctorate in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's of arts in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
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