The Hoover Institution hosted its annual Spring Retreat beginning on Sunday, April 21, 2013, with before-dinner remarks by Kevin Warsh, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His speech, titled “The Economy over the Horizon: Unknown Knowns,” emphasized the importance of the state of the economy, which currently has a 2 percent growth rate, and understanding the concept of “unknown knowns,” a reference to former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Wednesday, December 2, 1998 Four Hoover Institution scholars have been named Helen and Peter Bing Fellows thanks to a generous gift from Hoover Overseer Peter Bing and his wife, Helen. The Bings are long-time supporters of the Hoover Institution and ...

Stephen Haber, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Victor Menaldo, a national fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2009–10, worked together to write Rainfall, Human Capital, and Democracy, which has received excellent reviews from the Wall Street Journal. They say, the parts of the world suited to grain-growing have developed the institutions that build equitably distributed human capital and hence democracy.” Click here to read the full article.

Supplementing his weekly column “The Libertarian,” which appears in the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas, Hoover Institution senior fellow Richard Epstein posted his first Libertarian podcast on January 21, 2013.

Stephen Haber, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the A. A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, was recently awarded the 2012 Premio Manuel Espinosa Yglesias for best essay on banking and foreign entry into Mexico from the book These Are the ‘Good Old Days’: Foreign Entry and the Mexican Banking System, written with Aldo Musacchio.

On December 17, 2011, Michael McFaul, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University, was confirmed as the next United States ambassador to Russia. McFaul is currently on leave from his position at Hoover to serve as special assistant to President Obama for national security affairs and senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council. McFaul has become known in Washington as a passionate defender of Mr. Obama’s policy, arguing that the United States can speak out on democracy and Georgia while still seeking cooperation with Moscow in other areas.

Read more about McFaul’s appointment in Businessweek.

As part of the inaugural Hoover Institution Library and Archives’ Workshop on Political Economy, Professor Angus Burgin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote lecture titled "Hayek, Friedman, and the Return of Laissez-Faire." 

Chairman Hebert Dwight convened the meeting of the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers at the Willard InterContinental hotel in Washington, DC, on Sunday, February 24, 2013. In addition to conducting its usual business in its semiannual two-day meeting in Washington, the board had the opportunity to hear from leading legislative and judicial officials from the federal government and to learn of the research of selected Hoover fellows.

Campaign strategies for the upcoming presidential election, the state of the economy, and the Middle East were the topics at the Hoover Institution’s May 28–29 retreat.