Hiring Mark Carney may just be George Osborne’s best move since becoming Chancellor. Britain badly needed a break from the failed economic consensus which still hangs around the Bank of England like a bad smell. In August, The Spectator implored the Chancellor to mount a global search. When Carney ruled himself out, I gave up hope and resigned myself to Paul Tucker, who would be likely to keep Britain on its current Faustian monetary path paved with freshly-minted banknotes.
Instead, Osborne has succeeded in hiring one of the best-qualified of all the Queen’s 137 million subjects — from a country that knows a thing or two about economic crises and how to handle them. Carney is not an academic like Sir Mervyn; he spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs and knows the banks and their tricks. He is anti-bailout and commands sufficient international respect to be made chairman of the G20’s Financial Stability Board.
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