George Osborne and Mervyn King’s Mansion House speeches have just been published. Their content makes it clear that the Bank of England will be all-powerful in UK financial regulation and Mr King will sit on top of the new castle. He was already so powerful he felt able to make jokes about the chancellor’s youth, something I gather is generally not popular in Number 11.
(Boring aside. Mr Osborne is 39, 23 years younger than Mr King, a subject on which the governor chose to dwell at some length in a way that, to put it politely, bordered on patronising.)
Earlier today I wrote a list of things we did not know. Here are the answers in red:
- What “oversight of micro prudential regulation” precisely means. It is a slippery concept which could include anything from the movement of the entire supervisory role of the Financial Services Authority into the Bank of England to a very limited role for the Bank in gaining more access to information. It means making the banking supervisors from the FSA a subsidiary of the Bank of England. Hector Sants of the FSA will be the new chief executive of the prudential regulator and a Bank of England deputy governor. This subsidiary will carry out
Let no one accuse the Bank governor of complacency. He insisted otherwise in his Mansion House speech just published. But he is on pretty confident form.
Sir John Vickers is warden of All Souls College, Oxford University, but has long been a core member of the British economic establishment. Until recently he was president of the of the Royal Economics Society and rare among economists in having held jobs in supervising both overall economic policy, as chief economist of the Bank of England, and detailed regulation and promotion of competition in individual industries, as chairman of the Office of Fair Trading.
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