Practically every major hedge fund manager in the country has read Fooled by Randomness , by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House 2004). First released in 2001, the book was updated in 2005 and expanded with a new postscript. Since Long Term Capital Management, the 1998 hedge fund debacle engineered by supposedly expert Nobel laureate economists
The Free Market 14, no. 7 (July 1996) Voter opposition to major “free trade” agreements helped propel a surge in protectionist rhetoric this year. Even constituencies when should be naturally free trade—Republican conservatives—have fallen prey to old fallacies. But mainstream Republicans largely have themselves to blame for this phenomenon. By
The Free Market 15, no. 7 (July 1997) The World Trade Organization has a fantastic but undeserved reputation in international circles as the world’s premier institution of free trade. Despite all of the WTO’s pretensions to greatness, this glorified trade-management bureaucracy exists only to promote the interests of well-heeled trade lobbyists
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) When the Soviet Union’s central planners failed year after year to produce a respectable grain harvest, they blamed “bad weather.” If only the weather could be controlled, Moscow dreamed, communism might be made to work. Officially, communism is dead, but the bureaucratic obsession with controlling the
The Free Market 17, no. 7 (July 1999) According to the hoopla, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created in 1995 as an instrument of global free trade. Instead, it is proving to be a vehicle for corruption, economic reprisals, and politicization of trade. The agency’s true character was revealed when the city of Seattle, host of the
The Free Market 18, no. 2 (February 2000) The city of Seattle, which had planned to make money on hosting the World Trade Organization, wound up trying to cut its losses by asking the WTO to end its conference early and leave town. Self-described free-traders who helped to create the WTO ought to be feeling the same way. The organization that
The piece by Manuel F. Ayau (” An Unfree Trade Agreement for Central America “) in the WSJ is outstanding—and an uncharacteristic editorial choice for a paper that uncritically backed Nafta: Guatemala’s President Alfonso Portillo remarked recently that the Central American region has discarded protectionism, recognizing it as a pernicious
The Free Market 20, no. 10 (October 2002) The US government is attacking capitalism under the guise of cracking down on “corporate criminals.” Corporate CEOs are being demonized and blamed for the collapsing stock market Bubble. Exploiting the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies, Washington DC has imposed the most sweeping accounting and securities
The Free Market 21, no. 6 (June 2003) Not content with extracting $1.4 billion in fines from Wall Street securities firms, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has set his sights on hedge funds. The state prosecutor has begun a formal investigation to determine whether certain hedge funds misled investors and manipulated the stock market.
The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) After attending a leading business school for the last year, I have been witness to capitalist bashing that rivals that of high schools and colleges. The chilling part is that these schools are training future business managers working in a free-enterprise system. In fact, the business schools that produce
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.