Event details
21 May 2018
Book Launch – Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Sir Paul Tucker
Complimentary copies will be available on the night for all those attending.
Agenda:
17:15-18:00 – Registration/Tea & Coffee
18:00-18:10 – Francisco Veloso will introduce Sir Paul Tucker and Stephen Cecchetti before their discussion.
18.10-19.00 Discussion between Sir Paul Tucker & Stephen Cecchetti (Time for questions from the audience will be available)
19.00-20.00 Drinks reception
Background
Sir Paul Tucker (born 24 March 1958) is a British economist and central banker. He was formerly the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, with responsibility for financial stability, and served on the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee from June 2002 until October 2013 and its interim and then full Financial Policy Committee from June 2011. In November 2012 he was turned down for the position of governor in favour of Mark Carney. In June 2013, Tucker announced that he would leave the Bank of England, and later that he would be moving to Harvard. He was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to central banking. Since late 2013, Tucker has been a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. He is a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Center for European Studies.
Tucker’s book, Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State, will be published in May 2018 by Princeton University Press.
Tucker was educated at Codsall High School, Wolverhampton, and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied maths and philosophy. He joined the Bank of England very shortly afterwards, in 1980. He was appointed Deputy Governor of the Bank of England with effect from March 2009. A July 2012 memo submitted to the Treasury Select Committee and released by the Wall Street Journal suggested that Tucker may have implicitly pressured Barclays to manipulate its Libor submissions by relaying a message from senior members of the UK government that “it did not always need to be the case that [Barclays] appeared as high as [Barclays] has recently.” The memo also noted that Diamond did not believe he received an instruction from Tucker. In August 2012, the Treasury Select Committee noted in its report into Libor that the conclusion of the Financial Services Authority was that “no instruction for Barclays to lower its LIBOR submissions was given during this telephone conversation”, but that “as the substance of the telephone conversation was relayed down the chain of command at Barclays, a misunderstanding or miscommunication occurred” so that “Barclays’ Submitters believed mistakenly that they were operating under an instruction from the Bank of England”. The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission also came to similar conclusions following their investigations.
In December 2015, Tucker became chair of the Systemic Risk Council, a body set up in 2012 by former regulators and central bankers to promote financial stability. Its first chair was Sheila Bair, former Chair of the FDIC, and its members include Paul Volcker (former Chair of the Federal Reserve) and Jean-Claude Trichet (former President of the European Central Bank). Since Tucker became chair, the SRC has issued a statement to G20 Finance Ministers and Governors on financial reform and, among other things, intervened on various US Treasury proposals to roll back financial regulation.
In the winter of 2013 Stephen Cecchetti returned to Brandeis University Business School as a tenured professor.
From August 1997 to September 1999, Cecchetti was Executive Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Earlier, he had been for short periods a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Winter-Spring 1986), and a Research Economist at the National Commission for Employment Policy, Washington, D.C., Summer 1981.