What went wrong in 2007? This richly rewarding book considers the lessons of the financial crisis, the future of the euro and how to restore growth to the global economy
Former governors of the Bank of England do not, with the odd 19th-century exception, write books – least of all books like The End of Alchemy, whose bibliography starts with Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state under Truman, and finishes with Stefan Zweig, taking in Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Hayek and Arthur Waley on the way. But then, Mervyn King was never a governor out of central casting. He grew up in the West Midlands; he is not privately educated; his devotion to Aston Villa runs longer, deeper and more constant than the prime minister’s; and for many years, before joining the bank in 1991, he was an academic economist. He also has a hinterland, quoting at the outset two of TS Eliot’s most haunting lines: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – lines that any education minister should have pinned up on their office wall.
The Jamesian donnée of his book is a remark made towards the end of his governorship. “We in China have learned a good deal from the west about how competition and a market economy support industrialisation and create higher living standards,” a Chinese central banker observed to him in Beijing in 2011, as they relaxed after a game of tennis. “We want to emulate that.” Then, as King recalls, came the sting in the tail: “But I don’t think you’ve quite got the hang of money and banking yet.”
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