Paul Tucker (banker)

Tucker was educated at Codsall High School, Wolverhampton, and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied maths and philosophy.[1][6]

Tucker joined the Bank of England in 1980.[7] From 1980 to 1989 Tucker worked in banking supervision; in corporate finance at a merchant bank; on reforming Hong Kong following the 1987 crash, and then the UK's wholesale payments system, leading to the introduction of real-time gross settlement. He was Principal Private Secretary to Leigh-Pemberton, BOE Governor, for nearly four years until 1993. He became Head of Gilt-Edged & Money Markets Division in mid-1994, during a period of reforms in the money markets. He was Head of Monetary Assessment and Strategy Division 1997–1998, responsible for assessing UK monetary conditions and issues concerning the monetary framework. From January 1999, he was Deputy Director of Financial Stability, and was closely involved with the Bank's Financial Stability Review. From 1997 to 2002, he was also on the Secretariat of the Monetary Policy Committee, preparing the published minutes.

Starting in June 2002, he became Executive Director for Markets, with responsibility for (i) the Bank's implementation of monetary policy and the management of its balance sheet more generally, including management of UK's foreign currency reserves; and (ii) for market intelligence and analysis supporting the Bank's monetary and financial stability core purposes.[1] At the same time he was appointed a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee and Executive Director for Markets from June 2002.[8] He has been described as trying to break down silos between different parts of the central banking during this period.[9] That theme had featured in various speeches before the financial crisis focusing on financial innovation, the monetary aggregates, and stability.[10][11]

He was reported as having pushed for a more active response to the liquidity crisis. [12]

He was appointed as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England with effect from March 2009. In this capacity he was closely involved in framing and implementing the extension of the central bank's formal responsibilities and powers into micro and macro-prudential supervision of the financial system, following the financial crisis of 2007–2009.[13]

A July 2012 memo submitted to the Treasury Select Committee and released by the Wall Street Journal suggested that Tucker may have implicitly pressured Barclays to manipulate its Libor submissions by relaying a message from senior members of the UK government that "it did not always need to be the case that [Barclays] appeared as high as [Barclays] has recently."[14][15] The memo also noted that Diamond did not believe he received an instruction from Tucker.[16] In August 2012, the Treasury Select Committee noted in its report into Libor that the conclusion of the Financial Services Authority was that "no instruction for Barclays to lower its LIBOR submissions was given during this telephone conversation", but that "as the substance of the telephone conversation was relayed down the chain of command at Barclays, a misunderstanding or miscommunication occurred" so that "Barclays' Submitters believed mistakenly that they were operating under an instruction from the Bank of England".[17][18] The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission also came to similar conclusions following their investigations.[17][19][20]

During this period, Tucker spoke frequently about future risks to stability from shadow banking and clearing houses.[21] [22] [23] While on the Financial Policy Committee, Tucker also argued against the Bank of England being granted powers to intervene in the housing market for its own sake, as that would be highly political, contrasting that with powers that were needed to ensure the resilience of the financial system.[24][25]

Since late 2013, Tucker has been a Fellow[47] at the Harvard Kennedy School's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg. He is a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Center for European Studies.[48]

Following the 2016 referendum on European Union membership in the United Kingdom, Tucker co-authored a paper with Jean Pisani-Ferry, André Sapir, Norbert Rottgen and Guntram Wolff which lays out a proposal of a “continental partnership” between the EU and the UK.[49] According to the paper, such a partnership would grant Britain some control over labor mobility while preserving free movement of capital, goods and services [50]

Tucker's book, Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State, was published in May 2018 by Princeton University Press.[51] press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691196305/unelected-power It has been described as “rang[ing] with great erudition and clear logic across political philosophy, economics and public law to reconstruct from the ground up the case for the legitimate exercise of unelected power in a modern representative democracy.” [52]