IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-37915-2_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Advising the Bank of England (1992)

In: The Central Bank and the Financial System

Author

Listed:
  • C. A. E. Goodhart

    (London School of Economics)

Abstract

‘You are not here to tell me what to do. You are here to tell me why I have done what I have already decided to do.’ Montagu Norman, the longest serving (1920–44) and most famous Governor of the Bank of England, is reputed to have greeted one of the first economic advisers to be appointed to the Bank with this memorable phrase. There was, and remains, some considerable truth in the claim that part of an economic adviser’s job in any official body is to provide the best possible academic gloss to policy decisions which have been taken for a wide variety of other reasons, and in which decision-making process the economic adviser’s role is often relatively small. In any case most immediate policy decisions are primarily determined by the interplay of the pressure of events with the ideologies and prior beliefs of those in power. Moreover, nobody in authority, certainly no politician, is likely to continue to accept advice happily from someone, however well qualified professionally, who openly reveals fundamental disagreements with such ideologies and priors.

Suggested Citation

  • C. A. E. Goodhart, 1995. "Advising the Bank of England (1992)," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: The Central Bank and the Financial System, chapter 11, pages 236-239, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37915-2_11
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230379152_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37915-2_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.