Worthwhile British Initiative

Today’s FT (front page, below the fold*) declares that Mark Carney “has been informally approached as a candidate” to head the Bank of England “in June next year.” He is currently governor of the Bank of Canada.

It would be a good choice. As the speeches at the link above note, Carney is no fool, which often seems rather more than one can say for many members of David Cameron’s Administration.**

Of course, the BoE already has one foreigner who should be considered as Merwyn King’s successor—but Adam Posen is American. As the FT anonymously notes:

Naming a foreigner as Governor…would break with tradition, although Mr. Carney has a British wife, studied at Oxford university [sic] and worked at [The Giant Vampire Squid] in London early in his career.

“As a Canadian national, he is a subject of the Queen,” said one supporter. “That is important.”

I’m now waiting for Felix Salmon to start a “Posen for the BoE Governorship” campaign which, sadly, is likely to be about as successful as his “Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for the World Bank Presidency” campaign.

*no link–being a print subscriber, online access is limited to PDFs, and the website is quite unfriendly to non-online subscribers

**Cameron’s choices remind one that however pathetic Tim Geithner is, it is possible to do worse. I mean, really, George Effing Osborne? A man who supposedly prepared for five years in the “Shadow” role and came up with this shite?