The Bank of England has become so powerful since the financial crisis that limits to its independence are now needed, the former shadow chancellor Ed Balls has said.
Mr Balls, who was a key architect of the central’s bank’s move to independence under Labour in 1997, warned in a joint paper for the Harvard Kennedy School that the Bank could lose operational independence altogether if it did not cede some political control.
The Bank has been under sustained attack since before the EU referendum over claims of political bias and has even faced criticism from the prime minister, who claimed that its policy of low interest rates and quantitative easing was having “bad side effects”.
Ed Balls was a senior adviser at the Treasury under Gordon Brown
SEAN DEMPSEY/PA
Concerned that too much power has been concentrated in unelected