LORD MERVYN KING SPEAKS TO POPCON MISSION

"Inflation crisis was fuelled by economic groupthink, says Lord Mervyn King"

 

Telegraph: 2nd May 2024: Report on Lord's speech by the former Bank of England Governor in whcih he blames 40-year-high CPI on lack of dissenting voices

"Former Bank of England Governor Lord Mervyn King has criticised “groupthink” at the central bank for fuelling the inflation crisis. Lord King has said that a lack of dissenting voices at the Bank of England meant it failed to act swiftly and decisively enough to stop inflation from surging to a more than 40-year-high...

In a debate in the House of Lords, Lord King said: “It is troubling that not just on the [the Bank of England’s] Monetary Policy Committee but also the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee there were no dissenting voices to challenge the view that inflation was transitory.”...

Lord King said a “lack of intellectual diversity on the Monetary Policy Committee” crisis reflected a failure across the “academic economics profession” to challenge consensus."...

The former Bank chief also reiterated that the expansion of the Bank of England’s responsibilities to include a focus on climate change and the City’s competitiveness had led to an “inevitable reduction in focus on its monetary policy mission”. It was “frankly ridiculous to suggest that central banks can have any major impact” on climate change, he said, and called for a “cull” of such secondary objectives..."

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[PopCon says: We can remember the IEA publishing "Inflation: The next big threat" back in June 2020 (the early days of Covid) when our very own PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, was IEA boss. If only the BoE had listened back then]