former Governor of the Bank of England
Mervyn King served as Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to June 2013. He was knighted (GBE) in 2011, made a life peer in 2013, and appointed by The Queen to be a Knight of the Garter in 2014.
Lord King is the Alan Greenspan Professor of Economics and Professor of Law at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.
In 2016 he published The End of Alchemy. With a new preface, it appeared in paperback in 2017, and has been translated into many languages. His new book (with John Kay) Radical Uncertainty was published in March 2020.
Born in 1948, Mervyn King studied at King’s College, Cambridge, and taught at Cambridge and Birmingham Universities before spells as Visiting Professor at both Harvard University and MIT. From October 1984 he was Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he founded the Financial Markets Group. He is Chair of the Philharmonia Orchestra and a member of the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee.
Monday, 23. May 2016, 18:30 – 20:00 h
At the University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich, KOH-B-10
Why has almost every industrialised country found it difficult to overcome the stagnation that followed the financial crisis in 2007-2008, and why did money and banking, become the Achilles heel of a market economy? The post-war period saw unprecedented economic growth and stability followed by the worst financial crisis the world has ever witnessed. Most accounts of that crisis focus on the symptoms and not the underlying causes of what went wrong. Crises are not new, but there is no reason to accept them as inevitable. We can reform our system of money and banking to make it safer and regulation much simpler. Too many of the economic models used by central banks ignore the consequences of a world characterised by extreme uncertainty. Until that is recognised, recovery from the crisis will continue to be slow and patchy. But most actors in the present drama – whether banks, central banks, or even countries – are trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma that prevents them escaping the current stagnation. Future economic success will require new ideas.
Monday, 31. May 2021, 19:00 – 20:00 h
From the Studio
The former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, Lord King of Lothbury, in conversation with Walter B. Kielholz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Swiss Re, and Thomas Jordan, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank on the topic "Uncertainty, upheaval, hope - On the analysis of the current economic and political situation".