The Bank of Wales? Welshman Huw Pill appointed Bank of England’s new chief economist
A Welsh academic has been appointed as the new chief economist of the Bank of England.
Huw Pill, 53, will join the bank on September 6. He is a former senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Before that, he worked for the Bank of England from 1990 to 1992, then for almost two decades at the European Central Bank, before serving seven years at Goldman Sachs as chief European economist.
He has degrees in economics from the University of Oxford and Stanford University.
The Bank of England is the central bank of the entire United Kingdom, and has a monopoly on the issue of banknotes in England and Wales.
The bank also sets the interest rate, and Huw Pill will now be one of those sitting on the rate-setting monetary policy committee.
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said: “Huw will make a major contribution to monetary policy – and to the broader work of the Bank.”
However, the appointment of another Goldman Sachs alumnus drew criticism in the Times newspaper. Erik Britton, managing director of Fathom Consulting and a former Bank economist, said: “The Goldman Sachs takeover is beginning to seem like more than a coincidence.
“You don’t want any institution to be so strongly bound up with the central bank. It starts to look unfortunate.”
Huw succeeds Andy Haldane as Bank of England’s chief economist.
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When will this insult end. Wales is the only nation of the UK not to have its own National Bank or have its own paper currency or coinage.. Scotland, NI & England print their own bank notes that celebrate their great and good, where we in Wales have no ability to do similar. And when in the past there were calls for a National Bank of Wales and for us to have our own printed currency inline with the rest of home nations, were called separatists by the Conservatives for doing so, which is odd that this rule only applies… Read more »