Our Advisory Board – The Cobden Centre

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.
Philipp Bagus Philipp Bagus is a Professor of Economics at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He is also assistant editor of the journal Procesos de Mercado: Revista Europea de Economía Política. His main research areas are monetary theory and business cycle theory. He has published articles in the Journal of Business Ethics, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Independent Review, Review of Austrian Economics, New Perspectives on Political Economy, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Economic Affairs and other scholarly outlets. Dr Bagus is the author of The Tragedy of the Euro (Mises Institute: 2010) and Deep Freeze: Global Credit Markets and the Icelandic Financial Crisis (Mises Institute: 2011) coauthored with David Howden.
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 Group Editor of ClearView Financial Media, publisher of websites including 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 was a member and financial supporter between the mid-1980s and early 2011, 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.
Lord Caithness Lord Caithness is a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. Educated at Marlborough College and the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, he is a former Minister of State at the Home Office, the Department of the Environment and the Foreign Office. In 1989, he was the Paymaster-General. A member of the Privy Council since 1990, he is also a long standing opponent of fractional-reserve banking and an ardent supporter of free market banking and monetary reform.
Douglas Carswell Douglas Carswell was elected to Parliament four times, and was re-elected each time he ran. He co-founded Vote Leave, the official campaign that won the UK’s EU referendum. The author of several books and multiple policy papers, he has been an advocate for free market public policy ideas. He introduced a bank reform Bill in Parliament to limit fraction reserve banking, the Financial Services (Regulation of Deposits and Lending) Bill, which helped change the nature of public debate about bank reform in Britain. His efforts are referenced by Professor Jesús Huerta de Soto, of the University of Madrid, in his seminal book, Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles. Douglas has published numerous articles and papers on financial reform and banking for various think tanks, and has helped shift the public debate about banking over the past decade. He has spoken about free market reform of the banking system at many of Britain’s leading universities.
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.
Ben Davies Ben has over 17 years experience within financial and commodity markets, starting his career in 1994 trading credit fixed-income at Credit Lyonnais. He left his position as Head of US trading at RBS Greenwich to found his investment management company, whose foundations and funds adhere to the philosophy he espouses, not least of all by providing real asset protection for his investors. He has been an ardent advocate for monetary reform in many of his public writings and speeches in his capacity as CEO and co-founder of Hinde Capital.
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 samizdata.net
David Howden David Howden is Assistant Professor of Economics at St. Louis University. He has a BBA specialising in Finance from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Ph.D in Economics from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid
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.
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
Simon Rose Simon Rose began his career in the City as a trainee pension fund manager before becoming a traded options salesman. He moved to the BBC as a financial reporter, initiating the business slot on the Today Programme. As a financial writer, he penned long-running columns for The Sunday Times and Financial Weekly, presented The Rose Report on the City Programme and, for 8 years, wrote the award-winning Oofy Prosser money column in Punch. He also set up and edited The Shareholder magazine. His 13 books include Fair Shares: A Layman’s Guide to Buying and Selling Stocks and Shares and The Shareholder: The Truth About Wider Share Ownership, as well as the comic financial novel Filthy Lucre. He is now spokesman for the group Save Our Savers. He also reviews movies, formerly for The Mirror and now for BBC radio. In addition, he won the Orange Prize for Screenwriting and wrote The Flying Scotsman, which opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2006.
Mark Seddon Mark Seddon is the former United Nations Correspondent and New York Bureau Chief for Al-Jazeera English TV. He has reported from over twenty countries, including the United States, North Korea, China, Haiti, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has interviewed, amongst others, Ban Ki-Moon, Lech Walesa, Tony Blair, Hans Blix, Michael Foot, Mia Farrow, and George Clooney. In a journalistic career spanning over twenty years, Mark has been Editor of Tribune and an elected member of the UK Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. He has written for most British newspapers and many magazines, including the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mail, The Times, the Spectator, New Statesman, Private Eye, British Journalism Review and Country Life Magazine. For a number of years he was a Diarist at the London Evening Standard, and has also reported for, amongst others, the BBC and Sky TV. He lives in Buckingham, England.
Ewen Stewart Ewen Stewart is Equity Strategist at a major UK Investment Bank where he writes macro driven strategy research. His principal areas of interest include public sector deficit research and leverage related issues. Ewen is also on the Managing Board of the Freedom Association. Ewen lives in London and Somerset and is married with a young son.
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.
John Tomlinson John Tomlinson is a former stockbroker and merchant banker. He studied business administration at Florida State University and then joined Thomson and McKinnon, members of the New York Stock Exchange, in Indiana. He wrote his NYSE exams in Chicago and became a Registered Representative of the New York Stock Exchange in the early 1960’s. He practiced in Indianapolis and Toronto. He went on to join Bankers Trust and assisted in opening Ord-BT the merchant bank in Sydney, Australia. There he met an English girl and married and moved to England. In 1993 he published his book ‘Honest Money’. It predicted precisely how and why the banking system would fail, as it did 14 years later in 2007/2008. In 2008, he was responsible with the Earl of Caithness for introducing the Safety Deposit Current Account Bill in the House of Lords. While John Tomlinson is not a well-known public figure, he does have an extensive knowledge of the fundamentals of the banking system and has been campaigning for its substantive reform in the since 1970s. Today, he is very concerned that the system has not been fixed, is not being fixed and remains desperately in need of fixing. Sadly, he is confident that if it is not fixed properly now, it will collapse again, yet next time will not be much further in the future. Today, he and a business partner in Greenwich, Connecticut, are currently investing in affordable housing in the USA and setting up a fund to purchase occupied foreclosed residential properties from banks in order to convert the distressed owner-occupiers to tenants who will also have the right to repurchase their homes in whole or in part, as and when they can afford to.
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.
Sam Bowman Sam Bowman is Research Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Britain’s leading libertarian think tank, where he has worked since 2010. He is responsible for managing and editing the Institute’s publications and research, as well as managing the Institute’s team on a daily basis and helping with the ASI’s overall policy strategy. His current research agenda is the political economy of “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism”, a school of thought that tries to use free market policies to improve the welfare of the poor. His key policy areas are immigration and planning, which he sees as the two major areas where states hurt the poor globally and in the UK respectively. He is also interested in market monetarism, the epistemic challenges facing social democracy, and the case for wealth redistribution within free markets. He likes food, beer and music. He tweets as @s8mb.