Gerard Lyons believes the EU is a low-growth 'Titanic' and that Britain can be nimbler on its own in 'choppy waters'. Photograph: Pier Marco Tacca/Getty ImagesLyons, who was a front-runner to become governor of the Bank of England in 2019 before the job went to Andrew Bailey, says the bank lacks “credibility” and needs an overhaul. Britain also needs to jolt its economy out of stubborn low-growth mode.
Lyons believes the EU is a low-growth “Titanic” and that Britain can be nimbler on its own in “choppy waters”. He also says that post-Brexit Britain should target future growth through trade with significant mid-tier powers, such as Brazil and Nigeria, as well as with behemoths such as the United States.
“There is an Oxbridge bias in the UK,” says Lyons, who attended university at Liverpool and Warwick, before doing his PhD at the University of London. “I was in talks to move to another city bank but by then I was travelling five months of the year. The children were young, and I thought it would be nice to be based in the UK for a while.”
Johnson’s second term as London mayor ended in 2016 and three years later, when he was prime minister, his old adviser Lyons emerged as a favourite for the Bank of England role, where contenders were asked to complete rounds of psychometric testing. Britain’s economy, he says, is now stuck in “low-growth, low-wage, low-productivity” mode. “In recent years it has also become a high government-spending and high-taxation economy.”