The former Bank of England governor has been in the news recently.
From the Financial Times, yesterday:
"
King takes on Citigroup role despite past criticism of bankers"
Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, has quietly taken
up a role as a senior adviser to Citigroup, surprising friends and
former colleagues who assumed his disdain for bankers would stop him
following peers through the “revolving door” connecting policymaking and
finance....MORE
And from the New York Review of Books, the headline story:
Which Europe Now?
Political drama on television is finished. No fictional version could
match the vicious infighting in both main political parties in Britain
that followed the vote on June 23 by the British people to leave the
European Union.
What the vote revealed—and the winning margin was
larger than in three of the past four US presidential elections—is a
growing and dangerous divide between the political class, often a
metropolitan elite, and a large number of people who feel left out of
the economic prosperity centered on London and disenfranchised by
“political correctness.” Among the latter, insecurity has been growing
for years, the result in part of the impact of globalization on real
wages and of high levels of immigration.1 It is a problem afflicting many industrialized countries.
Yet
the political class, still in a state of shock and disbelief, shows few
signs of recognizing the cause of its undoing. The campaign was not a
reasoned discussion of the case for the two options but a propaganda
war, the likes of which I cannot recall before in Britain, with both
sides calling each other, and with some justification, liars.2 And both sides continue to believe passionately that the other was the worse sinner.
Nor
was the press any better. Even those newspapers that like to think of
themselves as more authoritative and informed than their tabloid cousins
allowed their editorial positions to infect their reporting of the
campaign. No doubt their own commercial interests played a part.
It
was and is simply false to claim that exit from the EU will result in
Britain becoming either a land of milk and honey, on the one hand, or a
land of plagues and locusts on the other. In truth, the economic
arguments are much more evenly balanced. My own guess—and it can be
little more than that—is that the effect of EU membership on the level
and growth rate of national income in the long run will be much less
than either camp would like to claim. But we cannot know today....MORE
...Our political class would do well to recall the words of Confucius:
Three
things are necessary for government: weapons, food and trust. If a
ruler cannot hold on to all three, he should give up weapons first and
food next. Trust should be guarded to the end: without trust we cannot
stand....
HT:
Kim-Mai Cutler whose "
Forgetting History: 'Nothing Like This Has Ever Happened Before'" got me reprising Henry George and the land value tax back in February.
