Registration for UALR’s Institute for Economic Advancement’s 2012 Economic Forecast Conference is still open. The conference will be held from 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 30, at the Clinton Presidential Center.

Tickets are available for $85 and can be purchased online at iea.ualr.edu or by calling Tonya Hass at 501.683.7407.

IEA Chief Economist and State Economic Forecaster Michael Pakko will unveil his forecast for Arkansas. Chris Varvares, co-founder and president of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC of St. Louis, will deliver the national economic forecast.

Varvares has more than 25 years of experience in macroeconomic forecasting and policy analysis, both as a principal of Macroeconomic Advisers since 1982 and as a member of the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1981 to 1982.

Dr. W. Michael Cox, director of the O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, will provide the luncheon keynote.

The former chief economist and senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Cox has served for 25 years advising U.S. presidents on monetary and other economic policies.

He retired in 2009 to become the founding director of the Center for Global Markets and Freedom in the Cox School of Business at SMU. He writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and other printed media. He is a regular guest on C-SPAN, MSNBC, NBC, and Fox News, where he comments on monetary and other government policy.

Cox is author of the book “Myths of Rich and Poor,” which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a professor for 36 years after earning his Ph.D. in economics at Tulane University.