Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont famously claimed to have sung Edith Piaf in the bath after allowing Sterling to crash out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. No regrets there supposedly. Good idea to have a parliamentary select committee interview the Reserve Bank but surely it is really second-guessing when they faced an un…
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont famously claimed to have sung Edith Piaf in the bath after allowing Sterling to crash out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. No regrets there supposedly. Good idea to have a parliamentary select committee interview the Reserve Bank but surely it is really second-guessing when they faced an unknown and nearly impossible-to-forecast crisis in the pandemic? We may want the result to have been different but they were driving into a storm. I also question just how much inflation is domestically driven as even the domestic components are affected by global factors such as supply chain problems, materials demand, and missing workers in many industries. Given 11% inflation in the UK and high inflation in the US it seems we are part of a global trend which others forecast over the past two years. Love, Peter
Ha! Love the idea of Norman in the bath. Sort of. I think we need more than a select committee review. The argument about unknown unknowns and known unknowns is powerful for the first three or four months. But we knew by July/August of 2020 that things had settled. We certainly still shouldn't be lending banks cheap money via Funding for Lending. Our central bank could be just as wrong as the others, but hopefully they wouldn't make the same mistake again. I think the others would. And why we need our own review to put the blowtorch to the Reserve Bank's belly.
The trouble with putting supposedly independent civil servants into a political melee, especially with blow torches, is that they then behave differently in future.
Also, the idea of Norman Lamont naked is almost too much to bear. Mind you, there is an excellent story -- well-reported -- of him turning up at a potential girlfriend's house (when I say girlfriend I mean another man's wife and someone married into the Forte hotel family) and leaving with a black eye when her husband took against that idea.
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont famously claimed to have sung Edith Piaf in the bath after allowing Sterling to crash out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. No regrets there supposedly. Good idea to have a parliamentary select committee interview the Reserve Bank but surely it is really second-guessing when they faced an unknown and nearly impossible-to-forecast crisis in the pandemic? We may want the result to have been different but they were driving into a storm. I also question just how much inflation is domestically driven as even the domestic components are affected by global factors such as supply chain problems, materials demand, and missing workers in many industries. Given 11% inflation in the UK and high inflation in the US it seems we are part of a global trend which others forecast over the past two years. Love, Peter
Ha! Love the idea of Norman in the bath. Sort of. I think we need more than a select committee review. The argument about unknown unknowns and known unknowns is powerful for the first three or four months. But we knew by July/August of 2020 that things had settled. We certainly still shouldn't be lending banks cheap money via Funding for Lending. Our central bank could be just as wrong as the others, but hopefully they wouldn't make the same mistake again. I think the others would. And why we need our own review to put the blowtorch to the Reserve Bank's belly.
The trouble with putting supposedly independent civil servants into a political melee, especially with blow torches, is that they then behave differently in future.
Also, the idea of Norman Lamont naked is almost too much to bear. Mind you, there is an excellent story -- well-reported -- of him turning up at a potential girlfriend's house (when I say girlfriend I mean another man's wife and someone married into the Forte hotel family) and leaving with a black eye when her husband took against that idea.