The "golden generation" of central bankers?

I've dissed Alan Greenspan many times over the years -- just type "maestro" into the search box at the top left of the page and stand well back.  Wim Duisenberg at the ECB was always a figure of fun ("dim Wim"), and his successors don't seem to be getting much better press:  a week or two ago, an article on Slate described the ECB as disastrously incompetent.  And the Bank of Japan has been trying and failing to get that country's economy out of the mire for what seems like decades.

Now it's Mervyn King's turn in the stocks.  Professor Tim Congdon has written a splenetic attack on the departing BoE boss, portraying him as "the crank at the Bank" and claiming he is the Old Lady's worst-ever Governor.  The rap against Sir Mervyn, according to Congdon, is two-fold.  Firstly, he's not really a money and finance expert by training, so he's had to learn on the job; and secondly, his attitude towards the financial sector is still "hostile and bigoted".   As hostile and bigoted, in fact as "most university dons", which suggests that Professor Congdon has not noticed that since the financial crisis, fear and loathing toward the banks has spread far beyond the groves of academe.

I'm no fan of Sir Mervyn, but it strikes me as plain wrong to suggest that his poor track record in recent years is a result of his long-standing hatred of the banks.  He may well hate them now, but, like Greenspan, his problem before the financial crisis hit was that he was far too willing to trust them.. Far from watching them like malevolent hawks, both Greenspan and King showed enormous complacency in indulging the banks' every whim, and facilitating the deregulation of the sector, with catastrophic results.

Over at the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner has a half-hearted attempt at defending Sir Mervyn.   However, it's beyond reasonable dispute that while Greenspan and King (especially the former) were happy to take the credit when things were going well in the decade leading up to the financial crisis, they've been notably unwilling to shoulder much of the blame for the way things have turned out.  (The charge sheet against the heads of the ECB and Bank of Japan is different but no less damning).

Does anyone come out of the financial debacle smelling of roses?  Well, the Reserve Bank of Australia has done reasonably well, but of course the central banker du jour is Mark Carney at the Bank of Canada, now preparing to take over from Sir Mervyn at the Bank of England.  Carney will no doubt be reading Congdon's diatribe with great interest -- and pondering what may be written about him in a few years' time, if he doesn't turn out to be the miracle-worker the UK Government is hoping for.