"Confidence Men", a book based on 700 hours of interviews with high-level staff of the US administration, President Obama supported a FTT on trades of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments, but it was blocked by Obama's former director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers. Other opposers Most hedge funds managers fiercely oppose FTT. So does the economist and former member of Bank of England Charles Goodhart. The Financial Times, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Advisory Council, the Confederation of British Industry, and the Adam Smith Institute have also spoken out against a global financial transaction tax. IMF's position In 2001, the IMF conducted considerable research that opposes a transaction tax. On 11 December 2009, the Financial Times reported "Since the 7 Nov [2009] summit of the G20 Finance Ministers, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Mr Strauss-Kahn, seems to have softened his doubts, telling the CBI employers' conference: 'We have been asked by the G20 to look into financial sector taxes. ... This is an interesting issue. ... We will look at it from various angles and consider all proposals.'" When the IMF presented its interim report for the G20 on 16 April 2010, it laid out three options: a bank tax, a Financial Activities Tax (FAT), and a third option (which was not promoted but not ruled out), a financial transaction tax. On 16 April 2011, the IMF stated, it does not endorse a financial transaction tax, believing it "does not appear well suited to the specific purposes set out in the mandate from the G-20 leaders". However, it concedes that "The FTT should not be dismissed on grounds of administrative practicality". Challenging the IMF's belittling of the financial transaction tax, Stephan Schulmeister of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research found that, "the assertion of the IMF paper, that a financial transaction tax 'is not focused on the core sources of financial instability', does not seem to have a solid foundation in the empirical evidence." Additionally, the IMF's watchdog group, the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), released a report in 2011 which questioned the quality and level of bias in the IMF's research between 1999 and 2008. The report indicated that "there is a widely held perception that IMF research is message driven. About half of the authorities held this view, and more than half of the staff indicated that they felt pressure to align their conclusions