“Who would have guessed in late 2007 or early 2008 that an answer to the banking crisis would be to hand more power to Mervyn King?” asks the Guardian’s Nils Pratley. King has long been admired in Tory circles and so George Osborne’s decision to give the Bank of England the linchpin role in regulating the UK’s financial sector came as no real surprise.
I’m no fan of Merv. I think he long ago politicised and abused his position. Remember his public objection to the Labour government’s fiscal stimulus? Remember his public approval for the coalition’s deficit reduction plan?
He also has rather poor judgement. My colleague Professor David Blanchflower, a former external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee and one of the few economists to see the crash coming, outlined King’s failures in a devastating piece for the NS in September 2009 (“The story from the inside“).
Blanchflower wrote:
So why did the committee get it so wrong? From my perspective, it was hobbled by “group think” — or the “tyranny of the consensus”. Governor Mervyn King, the old iron fist of the Bank of England, with his hawkish views on rates, dominated the MPC. Short shrift was given to alternative, dovish views such as mine. I focused on the empirical data suggesting Britain was heading for recession; Mervyn and the rest of the committee focused on their theoretical models and the (invisible) threat of inflation. In fact, the Bank of England may more suitably be called “the Bank of Economic Theory”. Unfortunately, the economic theories failed just when we needed them most.
He added:
Clever as Mervyn King may be, he missed the crash and the subsequent recession, and hence, so did the consensual MPC on which I sat. In August 2008, the MPC’s quarterly Inflation Report did not even contain the word “recession”; it saw the economy standing still over the next year. I very nearly quit the committee at that point. In an interview that month with Reuters, I called the forecast “wishful thinking”. Mervyn called me into his office to admonish me for that one.
Blanchflower also criticised King’s obsession with so-called moral hazard:
We were not told what was happening to British banks such as Northern Rock, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Bradford & Bingley or Alliance & Leicester. Or to US banks such as Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns. We weren’t kept in the loop, but we should have been. With hindsight, Mervyn King’s focus on moral hazard — the idea that banks are encouraged to take more risks because they know they will be bailed out — was a huge mistake.
He reminds us of King’s unforgivable failure to foresee the explosion in unemployment:
In the summer of 2008, I warned the Commons Treasury select committee that “something horrible” was going to happen. I was becoming even more worried about recession, and in September I voted alone, as ever, for a cut of 50 basis points (bps) — or 0.5 per cent — to the Bank’s base rate. At my September appearance before the select committee, King, who was sitting two seats from me at the time, was asked by the MP Andy Love: “On unemployment there have been some suggestions, and Mr Blanchflower has said — and I think there are quite a lot of people out there who would agree with them — that it may go up faster than the projections in the Inflation Report. Is that a worry to you?”King replied: “At least the Almighty has not vouchsafed to me the path of unemployment data over the next year. He may have done to Danny, but he has not done to me.” To say the least, I was rather surprised.
Hail the King? I’d rather not.
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