Bradley Belt - Career

Career

Belt has extensive executive management, operations, finance and policy experience in the private, public and non-profit sectors. His previous government service includes senior staff positions with the Securities Exchange Commission and the U.S. Senate, including as counsel to the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. In the private sector, he has been an executive of a financial services and technology company, and managing director of merchant banking and public affairs strategy firms. He also served as senior vice president of the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Belt became the executive direction of PBGC in April 2004. The PBGC was set up by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974, to guarantee defined benefit pension plan benefits for plan sponsors that become insolvent when there are too few pension plan assets to fully pay all insured pension benefits. As the chief executive officer of PBGC, Belt oversaw the U.S. government corporation that insures the pension benefits of private sector workers and retirees. He also played a leading role in the historic overhaul of U.S. pension rules, giving millions of Americans a better chance of getting the retirement benefits they earned. The bill also created added incentives for greater worker participation in 401(K)s. During Belt's tenure as director, the PBGC took on extensive liabilities from terminated pension plans, including United Air Lines, and became massively underfunded. On March 23, 2006 he announced his intention to resign effective May 2006.

He previously served as senior vice president of CSIS, responsible for policy development, corporate strategy, and oversight of the Center's international finance, information technology, and domestic policy initiatives.

Belt has been at the center of policy on pensions and international finance. He has served in senior roles at the Securities Exchange Commission, the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and as a senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He was named by SmartMoney as one of its Power 30 in finance and by Workforce magazine as one of its "10 Most Forward-Thinking Leaders in Workforce Management."

"Bradley D. Belt is senior managing director of the Milken Institute and head of the Institute's Washington office, where he oversees the Center for Financial Markets and related capital markets initiatives.

Belt joined the Milken Institute from Palisades Capital, a boutique restructuring advisory and investment firm he co-founded. Prior to establishing Palisades, he served in the Bush administration as the executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. As the chief executive officer of the PBGC, Belt was responsible for the operations and management of a $50 billion investment portfolio. Under his leadership, PBGC restructured its operations, adopted a new liability-driven investment policy, implemented performance-based human capital management strategies, established new risk management and internal control systems, and oversaw the resolution of many of the agency's largest and most complex financial settlements. Belt had been previously appointed by President Bush to the Social Security Advisory Board, and he helped shape and communicate administration policy on pension and retirement security issues.

Belt is CEO of Palisades Capital, as well as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation (the oversight board for Washington National Cathedral, and St. Albans, Cathedral, and Beauvoir schools), the Board of Directors of Zurich American Life Insurance Company, and the Advisory Board of Norfolk Markets. He is also a senior fellow with the McDonough School of Business (Georgetown).

A frequent speaker and commentator on pensions, retirement finance, regulatory policy and corporate governance matters, Belt was named by SmartMoney as one of its "Power 30" in finance and by Workforce magazine as one of its "10 Most Forward-Thinking Leaders in Workforce Management."

An Eisenhower Fellow, Belt completed an executive management program at the Kennedy School at Harvard University, received his law degree from Georgetown and obtained his undergraduate degree in business administration from the University of Nebraska. He is a member of the New York, District of Columbia, and U.S. Supreme Court bars."