Blanchflower’s Bank of England Vacancy Attracted 72 Applicants
Morgan Stanley’s David Miles beat 71 other applicants for the job on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee which David Blanchflower will vacate at the end of this week.
The government approached 10 people “to make them aware of the vacancy” on the panel, the Treasury said in an e-mailed response to a freedom of information request from Bloomberg News. It declined to say how many candidates were interviewed or got onto a shortlist for the final selection.
Miles, currently Morgan Stanley’s chief U.K. economist, won the job after the Treasury advertised for the vacancy on the nine-member panel in a new hiring procedure. He replaces the first policy maker to predict the recession, and may decide during his three-year term when to exit the bank’s unprecedented strategy of printing money before it ignites inflation.
“It’s going to be hard work, we’re at the start of a nasty decade,” said David Tinsley, an economist at National Australia Bank in London and a former Bank of England official, who didn’t apply for the position. “For a lot of City economists — Miles too no doubt — the job requires a pay cut.”
Total compensation is 128,600 pounds ($205,000), according to an advertisement placed in the Economist magazine in January. The job description called for an “independently minded” candidate able to “exert their influence” on policy.
Of the applicants responding to a questionnaire about ethnicity and nationality, 25 were British and 7 were not. Twenty-seven said they were white, one Indian and one Chinese, the Treasury said. Sixty-five were male and seven female.
No Breakdown
The Treasury refused to give a breakdown of the number of applicants most recently employed by financial institutions, in academia, or at a central bank.
“There are a relatively small number of people sufficiently qualified” from those fields, and “if we were to disclose the number of applicants from these different fields, we judge it could permit individuals to be identified with reasonable certainty and thus contravene their rights under the Data Protection Act,” the statement said pay day loan.
Officials don’t have a backup list for future vacancies on the panel, the Treasury said. In 2007, Parliament’s Treasury Committee called for a pool of potential candidates to be created in order to fill vacancies at short notice. Blanchflower, when asked by lawmakers in 2006 if his hiring process was rushed, replied: “Perhaps.”
“Each vacancy will be handled in accordance with the principles of transparency set out by the Chancellor in his letter to the Treasury Select Committee in June 2008,” the Treasury said in the statement.
Darling’s Shakeup
Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling last year announced the move to advertise posts for external policy makers in a shakeup of the bank after the run on Northern Rock Plc.
Blanchflower, whose term ends on May 31, has often disagreed with Governor Mervyn King. In 36 interest-rate meetings, he voted for a reduction 19 times, favored no change on 16 occasions and wanted an increase only once.
At his final decision this month, Blanchflower joined in a unanimous vote to boost to 125 billion pounds the bank’s plan to buy assets with newly created money, and to leave the benchmark interest rate at a record low of 0.5 percent.
The Treasury may start interviewing next week for the vacancy which will be created when Timothy Besley’s term on the panel expires on Aug. 31. It will announce the successful candidate later in June.
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