People

Professor Antal E. Fekete [Hungary]

Patron of the Institute

Antal E. Fekete, Professor, Memorial University of Newfoundland, was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1932. He graduated from the Loránt Eötvös University of Budapest in mathematics in 1955. He left Hungary in the wake of the 1956 anti-Communist uprising.

He immigrated to Canada in the following year and was appointed Assistant Professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1958. In 1993, after 35 years of service he retired with the rank of Full Professor.

During this period he also had tours of duty as visiting professor at Columbia University in the City of New York (1961), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (1964), Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia (1970), Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (1974).

Since 2005 he has been Professor at Large of Intermountain Institute for Science and Applied Mathematics (IISAM), Missoula, Montana.

 

Philip Barton [Vienna]

President

Philip Barton was born in Watford, England in 1946.  In 1965 he departed on what was supposed to be a six-month trip and, in his own words, is “a little overdue back home.”

He has lived in Australia, Colombia, Malaysia and the United States and currently resides in Vienna, Austria.  A long-time retailer and restaurateur he has also lectured, panned for gold, worked as a spray painter, hat maker, farmer, company director and investor.

He has had an interest in gold going back to the 1970s.

 

Thomas Bachheimer [Switzerland]

President – The Gold Standard Institute – Europe

Thomas Bachheimer has always been interested in crowd behaviour, particularly with reference to the markets.  He has a more than 20-year trading experience as both a propriety and systemated Trader for, amongst others, Greenhouse PLC in Dublin and Munich.  He was also Head of Trading for ALTEA LLC in Vienna.  Trading bonds led to the study of the “world of bonds and governmental debt”.  At that point worries about the monetary system kicked in.

After reading Alan Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom” his focus turned from bonds to precious metals and energy markets.  Within days he quit his job as a bond trader and began the development of an automated trading system for gold and energy futures.

In 2007 he initiated a physical gold fund in Liechtenstein and has been running this fund ever since, with an additional Futures-Fund (Amplitude Trading Hedge System) to hedge the physical gold.  Bachheimer also currently runs a wealth-protection-fund.

In the spring of 2004, with the oil price at USD30, Bachheimer predicted an oil price of USD 100.  This was due to his analysis of the money supply growth of the USD.  Since then (for the last 7 years) he has been a regular guest-analyst for energy-markets on CNBC, Bloomberg and N-TV with more than 50 live-appearances, mainly during OPEC-Meetings.

Bachheimer is a key speaker at meetings and conferences about the monetary system and publishes articles on the currency, energy and monetary metals.  He also writes about the influence of politics on the economic process.  He is a follower of the Austrian School of Economics.

 

Rudy Fritsch [Canada]

Editor in Chief

Rudy Fritsch was born in Hungary in 1947, the son of a patriotic Hungarian, Mr Rezso Fritsch.

Mr Fritsch Sr. had lived through WWII and the consequent Hungarian hyperinflation, but in spite of the opportunity to emigrate after the war, he stayed in Hungary on the hope that the newly liberated country would provide opportunity and freedom. Soviet Communist oppression destroyed all such hopes, and when another chance to leave the country arose in 1956 during the Hungarian revolution, he gathered up his family and left.

The Fritsch family built a new life in Canada, and Rudy, after doing engineering studies, joined the family business building metal forming machinery. The manufacturing company was very successful and Rudy eventually became president, then sole owner, and to this day the Allsteel line of metal forming machinery is well known in the industry.

The only difference is that today the Allsteel machines are no longer built in Canada, as they were for forty years, but in China! The fact is, off shore competition coupled with ‘new paradigm’ thinking along the lines of the so called ‘post industrial society’ has made manufacturing in North America extremely difficult, if not impossible. Rudy was forced to put the manufacturing company into bankruptcy before all the family wealth was destroyed.

In his efforts to understand why the previously profitable company became a loss maker, he started to study economics. These studies made him realize that mainstream economics, the so called ‘dismal science’, was full of nonsense and illogic. Much research led him to Austrian economics, and this school of economic science finally started to make some sense to him. He undertook a comprehensive study of the field, including the major works of Von Mises and Murray Rothbard, two acknowledged gurus of Austrian economics.

One day, surfing the Internet, he happened upon the writings of a Professor Fekete… and Fekete actually dared to criticize the work of Mises! Suspicious of this kind of talk about his hero Mises, and understanding that Fekete was a Hungarian, he thought; “who is this crazy Hungarian who dares to criticize Mises and the Austrians?” He decided to debunk Fekete; and in order to do this he began by studying all of Fekete’s works.

Interestingly, instead of debunking Fekete, Rudy came to realize that Fekete’s work has taken Austrian economics theories to new, breakthrough levels. Consequently Rudy started to work with Professor Fekete, using his engineering mindset to complement Professor Fekete’s scientific approach.

Professor Fekete is a monetary scientist as well as a very erudite and prolific writer. According to Rudy, making Fekete’s scientific work accessible to ‘the rest of humanity’ and applying his breakthrough theories to real world problem solving needs the mindset of an engineer. Rudy Fritsch is committed to ‘preserving and disseminating’ the vital knowledge that Professor Antal Fekete brings to humanity.

Sandeep Jaitly [UK]

Senior Research Fellow

Sandeep read mathematics at Imperial College, London. On graduation, he began working in finance at Odey Asset Management in London. Latterly, Sandeep was an investment manager concentrating on global equities with a bias towards India and China, at Soditic CBIP. Since encountering Prof. Fekete’s work, Sandeep has been concentrating on its application to practical investment – with emphasis on the gold market. Sandeep lectures worldwide on a broad range of topics related to Mengerian economics with Prof. Fekete. Sandeep is establishing a unique gold fund that allows investors to earn a return in gold upon their gold holdings.