King weighs in to attack the regulatory system

C Powell

Note also what he says about Sir Fred - ""I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon of a rather unappealing vengeance." and "You cannot blame one individual for the failure of a system."

He also attacks the level of public debt - "I do think public debt matters. We get to this crisis with levels of public borrowing which were too high and that made it difficult,".

Ken and George and William are going to have to run with this because this echoes exactly what the Tories have been saying.

cuffleyburgers

However, it is noticeable that it is all "would have been" implying that at no stage were these concerns actually raised, and therefore King is as guilty as the government.

A rather feeble form of the Nuremberg defence.

What I would expect, unless he has been hopelessly negligent and complacent are some memos somewhere from him to the chancellor saying "oi, there's an unholy mess brewing which you as govt will have to sort out with tax payers' money because we can't allow the banking system to fail" and brown replying "you must be joking there's a by-election coming up"

Tom Pride

Eddie George is the smoking gun. Will the Treasury Committee give him the chance to tell them what he advised Chancellor Brown back in 1997 when the Bank of England was stripped of its regulatory powers?

kinglear

Tough spin? More like baby drool.

Ian C

Another dose of special pleading from a central banker who was asleep at the wheel.

However, he is using the cover provided by Brown in 1997 when he castrated the BoE's regulatory role.

He is exacting the revenge that Eddie George must wish he could be dishing out. Perhaps he's writing the script!

richardj

Another case like the ministers,civil servants, bankers and MP's with large public funded pensions to look forward to. So no win, win scenario?

Patrickinken

Regulators would have had a "massively difficult task". This sounds right, but what did the Bank actually do to try to persuade the Treasury to take action? The Bank's Financial Stability report provided more than enough material to make the case to the politicians. But you get the impression that the Bank did not even try. I recollect that the Deputy Governor responsible for financial stability was John Gieve, ex-Treasury. I doubt that this would have been helpful.

jon dee

At last the truth about the failure of the FSA and the collapse of the tripartite regime begins to surface.

Any student of Tom Bower would recognise the reasons that Lord Turner and Mervyn King faced criticising the Blair/Brown wonderland. His account of the intrigue is worth studying.

The erasing of the economic cycle and a boom that would not bust were the deluded USPs for an ambitious Chancellor and a PR driven PM. Even an internal civil war between Blair and Brown would not detract from this economic miracle.

However incompetence, vanity and neglect still held off regulation and I can understand why.

The Prime Minister needs more rigorous questioning than he has had to date.

Denis Cooper

Tom Pride

I recall reading in the FT at the time that Eddie George threatened to resign over it.

Maybe it's a pity that he only threatened to resign, and didn't actualy do it.

l.gong

another spinless `civil servant` not unlike the so called whistleblower from HBOS who took his large pay-off to keep quite, untill now when the money could not be taken back...in the mean time the public lost their money.