Yeah, a yuppie.

Daniel Antal

I am a Hungarian economist with a strong interest in institutional reform in new Europe and an occasional essayist in Hungarian daily and weekly papers. My carreer was connected to regulated industries (telecom, banking, energy, railways). I was the Hungarian rail regulator between 1 January 2006 and 30 June 2008. The Hungarian Rail Office was abolished by a governmental decree in June 2008.

<very unbalanced personal opinion>
I first took notice of him for the extreme neoliberalism of his 'occassional essays' prior to his railway forays. Then, not long after I got my job with the railway, he set sights just on our offices. It took some time until he got his Hungarian Rail Office formed, during which time we were in limbo, but then we had to move. (But, funny thing, I never got to encounter him personally during his frequent visits, only saw his English-made car.)

The Hungarian Rail Office was to be an independent regulator in an open-access, free-market re-shaping of the railway sector. However, everyone whose competences Antal wanted to be transmitted to the ÍOffice, and everyone with power to lose in the top echelons of the continually re-organised Hungarian State Railways, resisted every way they could.

A competition where I must state I had no sympathy for either side: as readersd of this blog know, I think open-access on railways is a really bad idea, but also see the current crop of non-railwaymen managers picked to alibi-reform/rationalise a company hamstrung by decades of lack of investment as a bunch of incompetents.
</vupo>

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}