The Milken Institute is an independent economic think tank based in Santa Monica, California that publishes research and hosts conferences that apply market-based principles and financial innovations to a variety of societal issues in the US and internationally.

The mission of the Institute, founded in 1991 by financier and philanthropist Michael Milken, is "to improve the lives and economic conditions of diverse populations in the United States and around the world by helping business and public policy leaders identify and implement innovative ideas for creating broad-based prosperity."

The Institute focuses on human capital (talent, knowledge and experience of people, and their value to organizations, economies and society), financial capital (innovations that allocate financial resources efficiently, especially to those who ordinarily would not have access to them, but who can best use them to build companies), and social capital (bonds of society that underlie economic development, including schools, health care, cultural institutions and government services). It employs about 50 people.

Hugh Hendry is a Scottish fund manager at Eclectica Asset Management. He has become prominent in the United Kingdom for his commentary on the financial crisis.

Born in 1969 in Glasgow, Scotland, Hendry graduated from Strathclyde University in 1990 with a BA in economics and finance. It has been reported that he was the first non-Oxbridge graduate to get a job at the prestigious Edinburgh investment management firm, Baillie Gifford. However, this is not true - the firm started to recruit from other universities in the late 1980s. A number of Baillie Gifford's current partners who joined the firm prior to Hugh are graduates of Edinburgh, Dundee and Bristol.

Hendry has been referred to as "the most high-profile Scot in the controversial (Hedge Fund) sector."

Hendry has recently gained notoriety for railing against government bailouts and moral hazard in interviews and round-robin discussions. On an episode of the BBC’s Newsnight program aired on May 26, 2010, Hendry was featured along with Gillian Tett of Financial Times and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Hendry responded to a question from host Jeremy Paxman about the current European economic situation and the possibility of a Greek sovereign debt default with the comment, "I would recommend you panic".

Howard Marks (born Dennis Howard Marks on 13 August 1945) is a Welsh author and former drug smuggler who achieved notoriety as an international cannabis smuggler through high-profile court cases. At his peak he was supposedly smuggling consignments of the drug as large as 30 tons, and was connected with groups as diverse as the CIA, the IRA, MI6, and the Mafia. He was eventually convicted by the American Drug Enforcement Administration and handed a 25-year sentence to be served at Terre Haute, though he was released in April 1995 after serving just seven years. Though he had up to 43 different aliases, he became known as Mr. Nice, after he bought a passport from convicted murderer Donald Nice.

Marks was born in Kenfig Hill, near Bridgend, Wales, the son of Dennis Mark, a captain in the Merchant Navy, and Edna, a teacher. He has stated that his earliest memory is of throwing his father's ship's cat into the Indian Ocean; he also stated that that memory haunted him for the rest of his life, and that he was so young at the time that he had expected the cat to catch fish and then swim back to the ship. Brought up as a Baptist, he later turned to Buddhism, though he did not become a devout follower. He attended the Garw Grammar school in Pontycymer (he is a fluent Welsh speaker).

Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967) is a German-born American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. With Elon Musk and Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund with under $700 million in assets under management, and a managing partner in The Founders Fund, a $275M venture capital fund that he launched with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005. He was an early investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and sits on the company’s board of directors. Thiel was ranked #293 on the Forbes 400 in 2010, with a net worth of US$1.5 billion. However, this number now underestimates his wealth as his Facebook share alone, at a 2010 valuation, is worth US$1.7bn. Peter Thiel lives in San Francisco, California.

Born to German parents in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, moved to America with his parents when he was a toddler, and raised in Foster City, California. Thiel was a US-rated Chess Master and one of the highest ranked under-21 players in the country. He studied 20th century philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford University. An avowed libertarian, he founded The Stanford Review, now the university's main conservative/libertarian newspaper. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford in 1989 and acquired a J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1992.

Marc Lowell Andreessen ( /ænˈdriːsɨn/ an-DREE-sən; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. He is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social-networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook, eBay, and HP, among others. Andreessen is a frequent keynote speaker and guest at Silicon Valley conferences. He is one of only six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the first international conference on the World Wide Web in 1994.

Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and raised in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, the son of Patricia and Lowell Andreessen, who worked for a seed company. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an undergraduate, he interned one summer at IBM in Austin, Texas, United States. He also worked at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he became familiar with Tim Berners-Lee's open standards for the World Wide Web. Andreessen and a full-time salaried co-worker Eric Bina worked on creating a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers. The resulting code was the Mosaic web browser.