Mervyn Allister King was governor of the Bank of England and chairman of its monetary policy committee from 2003-2013. He previously served as the Bank’s deputy governor, from 1998-2003, chief economist, and executive director, from 1991-1998, and as a non-executive director of the Bank, from 1990-1991. In 2013, King was appointed a life peer by Queen Elizabeth II for “contributions to public service” and entered the House of Lords on July 22, 2013 as a crossbencher, taking the title Baron King of Lothbury. King was appointed to the Most Noble Order of the Garter in 2014. He is also a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, and Fellow of the British Academy.

King studied at King’s College, where he graduated with a first-class master’s degree in economics in 1969, and at Cambridge University and Harvard University, as a Kennedy scholar. He went on to teach economics at Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, and Birmingham universities, and in 1984 became a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, where he founded the financial markets group and would remain until 1990.
Along with numerous articles, King is the author of The Taxation of Income from Capital: A Comparative Study of the US, UK, Sweden, and West Germany (with D. Fullerton, et al., University of Chicago Press, 1984), and three academic books on the British financial system.