Too important to fail
The Treasury Select Committee was on particularly supine form when half of the Monetary Policy Committee came to give evidence this morning, writes Chris Giles of the Financial Times, allowing Mervyn King and Pauol Tucker to paper over their differences on banking regulation. Read more
Secret emergency lending
Giving evidence at the Treasury Select Committee, Mervyn King, Bank of England governor, has just repeated his view that “banks that screw it up should be allowed to fail”.
You can see why. The Bank has also just revealed a few minutes ago that it engaged in secret emergency lending to RBS and HBOS at the height of the crisis last year. £61.6bn was lent between 1 October 2008 and 16 January 2009. These huge sums kept cash machines open. The alternative was very scary. No wonder King hates the banks so much. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
