Tag Archives: central banking

  I have mentioned the familiar names – Tucker, Vickers, Turner, Burns. Of these Paul Tucker has the deepest grasp of the issues the new governor will confront, and he is getting encouragingly more radical on bank reform – like everybody else. Even Lord Turner has been asking questions about the whole viability of fractional…
» Continue Reading

    In investment terms, we face a scenario that says neither bonds nor equities are likely to rise.  The ‘uncertainty’ is greater than ever.  And it is ‘uncertainty’ that drives people into gold, not relative values in paper currencies.  We have to think that gold is the central thing around which everything else moves….
» Continue Reading

  The knives are out for Sir Mervyn (“The Sun” ) King. Commentators who once stood in awe now rush to condemn him.This is not a pretty sight. It is also unfair to someone who, while not being the right man to manage the UK’s biggest financial crisis ever, has made important contributions to re-thinking…
» Continue Reading

Recent suggestions that Lord (Terry) Burns may be appointed chairman of a revitalised Court (Board of Directors) with greater powers of surveillance than the present Court make a lot of sense. That means the choice of governor, who will serve one term of eight years, may be between Paul Tucker, deputy governor, and Sir John…
» Continue Reading

This is indeed a red-letter day for RP’s Diary. A grand review of the book has been published in a prestigious US journal. It states that  The Money Trap “provides a superb explanation of how we got into this mess” – and a way out and “what we need to understand in order to properly…
» Continue Reading

        Mervyn King has mounted a defence of inflation targeting. Monetary policy, he claims, is part of the solution to the crisis, not part of the problem. This view was echoed by many official spokesmen at the recent IMF meeting in Tokyo. Christine Lagarde praised the central banks. There are quite minor…
» Continue Reading

First published in Central Banking, Vol XXIII, Number i, August 2012, page 86. Four insights in particular are worth mentioning: First, Pringle is right to draw attention to the frequency of financial instability in the post-Bretton Woods world. Since the early 1980s there has been an average of one such episode every three years. The relationship between these…
» Continue Reading

  My apologies to subscribers who – following my tip – have placed bets on Gus O’Donnell to be next Bank of England Governor (RP’s Diary 14/09/12). They might lose their money. How did I come to overlook the irresistible charms of (Lord) Terry Burns? Terry is a pukka economist who followed a respectable academic…
» Continue Reading

  One of the lessons of FinCR (financial crisis and recession) is clear. We have to get better at stress-testing. That is, we have to understand better than we did what circumstances can push banks over the edge into insolvency, and how regulators can spot weak banks in advance. Or so the story goes. The…
» Continue Reading

There is a short and a long-term way to view the debate on structural reforms in banking. Short term, the question is, will the EU’s Liikanen knock out the UK’s Vickers? Or will Vickers prevail? The recommendations are mirror images of each other, one ring-fencing so-called retail banking the other ring-fencing the investment banking bit….
» Continue Reading