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SUMMARY:The road to 1997: Bank of England operational independence in hist
 orical perspective - Dr Chetun Patel (King’s College London)
DTSTART:20260302T170000Z
DTEND:20260302T183000Z
UID:TALK242665@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Duncan Needham
DESCRIPTION:This talk will dissect the anatomy of Britain’s erratic cent
 ury-long search for a monetary ‘lodestar’ by tracing the evolutionary 
 arc from the classical Gold Standard to New Labour’s radical granting of
  operational independence to the Bank of England in 1997.  It will argue t
 hat this constitutional surgery was not merely a technical fix\, but the r
 esolution to a crisis of credibility that had plagued the British state si
 nce the breakdown of the post-war settlement.\n\nDrawing upon declassified
  Treasury archives and exclusive oral testimony from the era’s architect
 s—including Gordon Brown\, Ed Balls\, and Kenneth Clarke—this work rev
 eals the ‘hidden wiring’ behind the decision\, including Clarke’s se
 cret 1995 Treasury operation to blueprint independence.  We challenge the 
 narrative of Bank dominance by rehabilitating Her Majesty’s Treasury and
  pierce the technocratic veneer of the early Monetary Policy Committee thr
 ough candid interviews with its pioneering external members.\n\nBy isolati
 ng the political\, economic\, and institutional forces at play\, this talk
  will demonstrate how the 1997 settlement successfully depoliticised the w
 eaponisation of interest rates\, to deliver a robust framework that finall
 y reconciled the demands of good politics with good economics.\n
LOCATION:John Bradfield Room\, Darwin College and Zoom
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