Group. In 1987 Luskin joined Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, a division of Wells Fargo Bank, as senior vice president in charge of investment management and trading. He became vice chairman when the firm merged with Nikko Securities in 1989, becoming Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors. When the firm was acquired by Barclays Bank in 1995 and became Barclays Global Investors, Luskin became chief executive officer of the firm's global business in mutual funds. Over Luskin's eleven years with the firm, assets under management grew from $69 billion to over $500 billion. Luskin was responsible for numerous innovations in index funds and quantitative investing—including the development domestic and international quant-active funds, every one of which outperformed its benchmark over Luskin's tenure—and the creation of the first sector ETFs. Luskin created the LifePath family of mutual funds, for which he is the named inventor on a US patent. In August 1999, during the tech bubble, Luskin and partner Dave Nadig started the MetaMarkets Open Fund, the first mutual fund to publish trades and list its holdings in real-time via its website. This "transparency" and "openness," Luskin and Nadig said, was a step forward in the financial world, equivalent to the political revolutions and international democratic transformations of the 1990s, because it leveled the playing field for the average investor and overthrew "financial elites." MetaMarkets.com, the venture-backed company that Luskin and Nadig founded to operate OpenFund, was hailed by Fortune magazine as one of the "coolest companies" in America in 2000. Their model was dismissed by some analysts as being a "gimmick," having nothing to do with investing per se: "They brought chat boards to life in a mutual fund." At its peak, OpenFund received $45 million in investments, and the fund's biggest positions included companies like JDS Uniphase and Extreme Networks. At the end of 1999, OpenFund was among a handful of the best-performing mutual funds in America. After the market top in March 2000, the valuations of technology companies collapsed and many OpenFund investors redeemed their shares. The fund was shut down in the summer of 2001, after losing much of its investors' money. Published reports note that the open fund lost over half its value. Conflicts with Paul Krugman Luskin has been controversial as a public intellectual. Much of his blog and many of his NRO columns were devoted to arguments that economic facts, figures, and trends are distorted by