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Another financial crash may come ‘sooner rather than later’ – Mervyn King

Vicky Hartley
Written By:
Vicky Hartley
Posted:
Updated:
29/02/2016

Lord Mervyn King, the former Bank of England boss, has warned that another financial crisis is certain and will probably come “sooner rather than later”.

The governor of the UK central bank during the last financial crisis Mervyn King, who stood down in 2013, said reform of monetary and banking systems may help prevent the crisis, reports the BBC.

But he added that failure “to tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy makes it likely that it [a crisis] will come sooner rather than later”.

King, 67, who headed the bank between 2003 and 2013 wrote in his book The End Of Alchemy: Money, Banking And The Future Of The Global Economy, that the 2008 crisis was the fault of the financial system, not individual bankers.

“The crisis was a failure of a system, and the ideas that underpinned it, not of individual policymakers or bankers, incompetent and greedy though some of them undoubtedly were,” he wrote.

To tackle the disequilibrium in the world economy, he suggests raising productivity as well as reforming the banking system.

“Only a fundamental rethink of how we, as a society, organise our system of money and banking will prevent a repetition of the crisis that we experienced in 2008,” he said.

He added that global central banks are trapped in a “prisoner’s dilemma”, whereby they are unable to raise interest rates in case they derail economic recovery.