Enough said about the fall of Dame Alison Rose; more than enough about the second coming of Nigel Farage. But one question remains: what happened to the Governor’s eyebrows?
In former times, the fate of errant bank chiefs was unequivocally a matter for the Bank of England. Careers were sunk or salvaged by a twitch of the governor’s supercilia. When Bob Diamond of Barclays was under fire in 2012 after the rate-fixing scandal and the Barclays board tried to save him by offering the head of chairman Marcus Agiusinstead, the then governor, Mervyn King, ordered Agius to unresign and fire Diamond – while the chancellor George Osborne denied any part, saying it wasn’t his job to decide who ran Britain’s banks.
Not so nowadays. The Bank of England was busy last week appointing former US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to review its wonky forecasting and slapping more fines on Credit Suisse. But it refused to tell me anything about its role in the Rose affair.
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