Former Bank of England Governor Lord Mervyn King has criticised “groupthink” at the central bank for fuelling the inflation crisis. Lord King has said that a lack of dissenting voices at the Bank of England meant it failed to act swiftly and decisively enough to stop inflation from surging to a more than 40-year-high. In a debate in the House of Lords, Lord King said: “It is troubling that not just on the [the Bank of England’s] Monetary Policy Committee but also the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee there were no dissenting voices to challenge the view that inflation was transitory.” The former Governor, who helmed the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013, said he understood how “such groupthink came about” but complained that its impact had led “to the problems we are now all too familiar with”. Lord King said a “lack of intellectual diversity on the Monetary Policy Committee” crisis reflected a failure across the “academic economics profession” to challenge consensus. The result was that in both the UK and the US “at a point when it really mattered, we didn’t see a good deal of challenge to the prevailing narrative”. Britain has suffered the worst bout...