Andreas Acavalos
Andreas Acavalos is a Management Consultant specializing in organizational strategy and post-merger integration. Most of his career was with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Greece where he was for many years Managing Director of the firm’s consultancy practice.
Since 2002 he has been in private practice in Athens.
Paul Birch
Paul Birch studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College Cambridge, and Radioastronomy at Jodrell Bank. After working as a systems engineer in the fields of radar and satcoms he is now a freelance writer.
Many of his papers on space colonisation have been published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, of which he was elected a fellow. His Nature paper on the rotation of the universe attracted considerable attention worldwide. More recently he has devoted himself to the subjects of Economics and Legal and Political Theory; as an ultraminimal monarchist, he has a particular interest in libertarian thought, the free market and the efficient implementation of restitutional justice.
On a more pragmatic level, he is currently a Cowes Town Councillor and until recently was Branch Secretary of the UK Independence Party. He also performs in amateur theatricals and likes to sing G&S. His favourite role was as Lord Evelyn Oakleigh in Anything Goes.
Prof. Peter Boettke
Peter J. Boettke is BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center, and University Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.
Tom Burroughes
Tom Burroughes is Editor of WealthBriefing, a web-based news service and information resource for the world’s wealth management industry. As well as writing for the publication, he has also appeared on BBC Television as a commenter on wealth management, tax and economic affairs. Prior to joining the publication in early 2008, Tom was wealth management editor of The Business, the UK magazine. Between 2000 and the start of 2007, he was a reporter in various beats for Reuters, the international news agency, and from the mid-1990s to 2000, worked at Market News, a US financial newswire.
In addition to his professional writing, Tom Burroughes has also written pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance (UK), of which he has been a member and financial supporter since the mid-1980s, and has also spoken at seminars hosted by organisations such as the Adam Smith Institute. He is also a regular commenter for the libertarian group weblog www.samizdata.net, writing under the penname Johnathan Pearce. He lives in central London with his wife, Noreen.
Antoine Clarke
Graduate in Philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London, he is currently studying for a Masters in Business Administration at The Open University. He completed his Baccalauréat in Economics and Social Sciences at the French Lyçée Charles de Gaulle in London.
Has written about currency competition and free banking for the Libertarian Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute. A former member of the Slovak Republic Prime Minister’s Policy Unit in Bratislava and economic and political advisor to the Finance Minister of the Slovak Republic in 1991.
A journalist and communications expert, he has worked for media outlets in the UK, France and Spain, and is fluent in English and French.
Chris Coyne
Christopher Coyne is an Assistant Professor of Economics at West Virginia University. He is also the North American Editor of The Review of Austrian Economics, a Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and at The Independent Institute, a member of the Board of Scholars for the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, and Distinguished Scholar for the Center for the Study of Political Economy at Hampden-Sydney College. In 2008, he was named the Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics. Coyne is the author of After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (Stanford Economics & Finance) (2007, Stanford University Press), Media, Development and Institutional Change (co-authored with Peter Leeson, 2009, Edward Elgar Publishing), and numerous academic articles. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University.
Matthew Elliott
Matthew Elliott founded the TaxPayers’ Alliance in 2004 with Andrew Allum and Florence Heath. Under his leadership, the TPA has grown from operating as a group of volunteers meeting in various coffee shops around London, to employing fifteen members of staff working from offices in London and Birmingham, attracting an average of 700 high-quality media hits every month.
In 2006, the TPA won the ConservativeHome “One to Watch” award and in 2007 the Bumper Book of Government Waste was awarded the Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Award. In November 2007, Matthew was presented with the Conservative Way Forward ‘One of Us’ award by William Hague and in December the TPA won the Stockholm Network’s prestigious Golden Umbrella award for Innovation. In 2008, the TPA was named ‘Pressure Group of the Year’ by the readers of Iain Dale’s Diary and in October 2009 the Guardian described the TPA as “arguably the most influential pressure group in the country”. Matthew is also Chief Executive of Big Brother Watch, a new civil and personal liberties campaign which he founded in September 2009.
Matthew has written four books on public spending: The Bumper Book of Government Waste (Harriman House, 2006); The Bumper Book of Government Waste 2008 (Harriman House, 2007); The Great European Rip-Off (Random House, 2009) and Fleeced! (Constable 2009). In June 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the RSA. In addition to his Advisory Board position at the Cobden Centre, Matthew is on the Advisory Council of the European Foundation, Freedom Week and the Young Briton’s Foundation and on the Advisory Committee of the New Culture Forum.
Perry de Havilland
Gordon Kerr
Gordon is an investment banker with broad experience of banking collapses and the need for systemic reform, having started his career working on sovereign debt syndications and the Latin American debt crisis. He next specialised in housing finance and was designing Scandinavian mortgage securitisation structures when the Swedish banks collapsed and were bailed out by the state in 1992.
In the UK he helped protect housing associations from the rapacious demands of banks by designing a rent based financing structure that lowered the borrowing cost of the entire social housing sector by about 10% in 1995.
Shortly after the LTCM hedge fund collapse and bailout of 1998, he designed regulatory arbitrage structures that used derivatives to further leverage European banks. He also specialises in tax and synthetic financing.
He believes the banking crisis is far worse than nearly all politicians appear to accept.
Prof. Peter Leeson
Peter T. Leeson is Visiting Professor of Economics at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Previously, Professor Leeson was Visiting Fellow in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University, F.A. Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute of Economics. His research has received numerous awards including the Olive W. Garvey Prize, the Foundation for Economic Prize, and the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders Prize. His book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates was recently published by Princeton University Press.
Dr. Alberto Mingardi
Dr Alberto Mingardi is Director General of Istituto Bruno Leoni (www.brunoleoni.it), Italy’s free market think tank, which he founded in 2003. There, he is responsible for fund-raising and development, and enjoys the privilege of working with a team of marvelous people.
He pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at University of Pavia (Italy). His writings appeared in many national and international newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Il Sole 24 Ore. He is the English translator of Antonio Rosmini’s The Constitution Under Social Justice.
Chris Neal
Chris enjoyed a successful 22 year broking career in the City encompassing commodities, freight, fixed income and derivatives. In the early 1990’s he set up ICAP’s repo broking desk and also sat on the Bank of England code of best practice committee.
Chris retired from the City in 1999 and has been an active investor/mentor in eight businesses. In July 2009 he founded GB Works, a charity offering free training and resources for community job clubs. The charity also administers the Jericho Fund, a UK microfinance initiative supplying fledgling entrepreneurs with interest free loans and mentor support.
For more information, please see: www.gbjobclubs.org
Ewen Stewart
Ewen Stewart is Head of Research at Arden Partners which is a quoted UK Stockbroking firm with interests in the UK and India. Ewen is responsible for the firms Macroeconomic and Strategy research. He had previously worked with ABN AMRO and Investec.
Ewen is 44, originally from Edinburgh and married. He lives in London and Somerset.
Horia Terpe
Horia Terpe is Executive Director of Center for Institutional Analysis and Development-Eleutheria, a free market think tank based in Bucharest, Romania. He holds MA and BA in political science from the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration Bucharest and has an extensive experience in public policy.
James Tyler
James Tyler is the founder of Tyler Capital, a derivatives trading firm in the City of London, having previously worked in the bank trading floors for well over a decade.
A recent convert to Austrian economics, but a lifelong advocate of free markets, James now concentrates on supporting the cause of social and economic progress, the limitation of the state, and a return to sound money principles wherever he can.
Jamie Whyte
Jamie Whyte was born in New Zealand and educated at the University of Auckland and then the University of Cambridge in England, where he gained a Ph.D. in philosophy. Jamie remained at Cambridge for a further three years, as a fellow of Corpus Christi College and a lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty. During this time he published a number of academic articles on the nature of truth, belief and desire, and won the Analysis Essay Competition for the best article by a philosopher under the age of 30.
Jamie then joined Oliver Wyman & Company, a London-based strategy consulting firm specialising in the financial services industry, for which he still works, as the Head of Research and Publications.
Jamie has published two books: Crimes Against Logic (McGraw Hill, Chicago, 2004) and A Load of Blair (Corvo, London, 2005). Jamie is a regular contributor of opinion articles to The Times (of London), the Financial Times and Standpoint magazine . In 2006 he won the Bastiat Prize for journalism.