A Critical Review of Mervyn King’s The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy

It is always interesting when, after retirement, the head of a Central Bank begins profiting from his academic freedom by writing down the analysis of his achievements in office. This is true for Mervyn King as well. However, in contrast to other central bankers, whose views are frequently biased, King tries to analyse, on an abstract level, what is going wrong in the banking industry and how it should be reformed. Mervyn King, who was the head of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013, and who was in the meantime appointed by the Queen a Knight of the Garter in 2014, has apparently used his academic freedom as a professor at New York University and London School of Economics, to write both a masterpiece of understandable political economy and a highly valuable recommendation for reform. (Read more)