I wonder whether we are getting good value for our £870,000 per annum that we, the taxpayer, are ‘forking out’ for our esteemed Governor of The Bank of England Mr. Carney? Mmmm … rhetorical!
Ever since he has been ‘airlifted’ into the job, he has misread the Inflation and interest rate predictions by such a margin that he could be deemed amateuristic at best or reckless at worst.
By way of illustration, in 2013 the Governor said, “the Bank of England will not consider raising interest rates until the jobless rate had fallen to 7% or below”. At the time the rate stood at 7.8%. This affectively meant that interest rates should have gone up in 2014 since the jobless rate reached the ‘trigger’ level during this year. This would have had a profound effect on the value of the Pound and property owners would have been affected by higher mortgage rates. How damaging could have this have been for the Economy and homeowners alike if anyone had acted, unwisely, on his advice? I should add that the current UK jobless rate is 5.2%, as of December 2015.
During the same year of 2013 Mr. Carney said that Britain was trapped in the ‘slowest recovery in output on record’, yet, the UK became the fastest growing economy in the G7 during that time and in 2014.
Seeing the ‘errors of his ways’ at another of the sumptuous dinners, he made a speech that suggested “the ‘trigger’ for interest rates ‘would no longer be dependent on any one economic factor’…. hallelujah! Did this mean that he had to use his judgment that we were paying a lot of money for? What a deal!
Then, during another speech in 2015, he said that interest rates would be likely to rise in the first or second quarter of 2016, which effectively is now, and we are probably two years or more away from this and you don’t need to be a Harvard professor to work this out.
His ‘wide of the mark’ assessments are very recent since only last month he said that the movement in interest rates was likely to be ‘up’ and not three weeks later contradicted himself by saying “we could cut rates towards zero”!
This is the degree of misjudgment that we have had to suffer from this man, who clearly doesn’t understand the dynamics of the UK Economy and since he has not needed to change interest rates for the last seven years or so is starting to feel redundant.
As if this were not enough, he has now ‘waded’ into the Brexit debate with his ‘size nines’ by taking a conspicuously partisan view ‘that there were substantial risks to leaving the EU. Obviously the government had ‘knobbled’ him and ‘wheeled him out’ to make this prejudicial comment at ‘pain of death’.
Do we really need to hear more from this man and his views, since if we had taken his predictions seriously hitherto, we would be in a ‘holy mess’.
John Longworth, the former Director General of the British Chamber of Commerce, had to pay with his job for taking a partisan view on Brexit and yet Mr. Carney is still there drawing his more than adequate salary for himself.
Clearly, the Prime Minister is employing the most extreme tactics to try to ensure that the result in June goes his way, which is uncharacteristic of the him and could be an illustration of his extreme concern about the outcome and whether or not he will ‘hand in the keys’ to Number 10 in July this year.
The gratuitous use of ‘attack dogs’ and ‘yanking on the leash’ to control dissension must have a counter productive affect on sentiments and ‘me thinks he doth protest too much’.
The ‘Great British Public’ will make up their own minds, without the need for this extraneous influence. The last thing we need is a discredited Mr. Carney pontificating about these matters that are beyond his remit and perhaps that he doesn’t even understand, wait for it, just incase you thought that his tenure will be thankfully at an end after five years he has now said that he may want to ‘go on’ for another three years. Goodness help us all if he continues to be in charge.
Where is Mervin King when you need him? Come back, all is forgiven!
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