“Jonathan Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell, is the UK’s technocrat for all seasons, a British version of a French énarque.” This is how I described the subject of this exchange in a “Lunch with the FT” in 2016.
A graduate in economics and history at Cambridge, Turner has been a director at McKinsey and director-general of the CBI. He chaired the UK government’s pensions commission between 2003 and 2006, which recommended the creation of a system of defined contribution pensions, with employees allowed to opt out rather than opt in. This has proved transformative. He was chair of the UK Low Pay Commission from 2003 -06, and was the last chairman of the Financial Services Authority between 2008 and 2013.
In the last role, he wrote the excellent Turner Review: A regulatory response to the global banking crisis, which was submitted to the government in March 2009. He has also written several books, notably Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit and Fixing Global Finance. In this important book, he explained that our addiction to credit, which lay behind the 2007-09 financial crisis, is not just economically unnecessary, but a threat to economic and social stability.