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Bank Of England's Champagne Bill Soars Under Governor Mark Carney

All In It Together? BofE Doubles Champagne Spending In A Year
Asa Bennett
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Bank of England Governor Mark Carney smiles as he waits to deliver his speech on 'One Mission. One Bank. Promoting the good of the people of the United Kingdom' at the Cass Business School in London, on March 18, 2014. AP PHOTO / SANG TAN/POOL (Photo credit should read SANG TAN/AFP/Getty Images)
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Consumption of wine and champagne at the Bank of England nearly doubled in the year Mark Carney took over, as officials bought over 300 more bottles of booze.

The Bank revealed under a Freedom of Information request that officials spent over £4,126.56 on 444 bottles of wine and champagne in 2012, with the bill increasing to £7,990.20 for 756 bottles the following year.

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The rise in the bank's bill for wine and champagne may be linked to Mervyn King stepping down as governor in 2013, as he was given three leaving parties. Mark Carney took over in July in the same year. No purchases of wine and champagne have been made so far for 2014, the Bank said.

John Mann, Labour member of the Treasury select committee, condemned the spending on King's three leaving parties, telling HuffPostUK: "The rest of us organise our own leaving dos, it shows how out of touch the Bank of England is.

"It is no surprise that they ignored criminality by banks and bankers. Clearly the Bank of England do not believe that we are all in it together."

The Bank is not funded directly by taxpayers, but draws its funding from sources like the wider banking sector. The main source is known as a "cash ratio deposit", through which banks deposit cash interest-free with the Bank, which sinks it into investments that pay interest.

The interest earned from the deposits is used by the Bank in order to fund its operations. Due to the taxpayers' stakes in Lloyds and RBS, this means public money does effectively end up going towards the Bank.

What the British press said about Carney when he took over

Mark Carney: What The British Press Are Saying
Daily Express: He looks like George Clooney!(01 of10)
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Mark Carney may have been born in a tiny Canadian town but the man, who bears a distinct likeness to movie star George Clooney, is unlikely to fail the Britishness test when he makes his application for UK citizenship.Read more...
BBC: Carney faces many problems at BoE(02 of10)
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When you look in the round at what Mr Carney has taken on, it is easy to see why he fled when originally wooed by Mr Osborne - because it is reasonable to ask whether any mortal can do this job.Read more...
The Guardian: Carney means no change(03 of10)
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Today the chancellor confirmed that there will be no real change at theBank of England. There will be no change to the Treasury and Bank of England's obsession with inflation targeting and "price stability". Above all, he confirmed that there will be no reining-in of the banks; that banks will not be re-structured - to separate the retail and investment arms, and ensure that banks are no longer too big to fail. He confirmed this by appointing an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, Mark Carney, as governor of the Bank of England.Read more...
Daily Mail: A big job ahead(04 of10)
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The scale of the job facing Mr Carney is enormous. The independent Bank of England as established by Gordon Brown in 1997, was to be a narrow, monetary and interest-rate-setting body. The financial crisis of 2007-08 and recession that followed changed all of that....The borrowings on the balance sheets of London-based banks are four times the size of the country's total output - giving an indication of the size of the task that lies ahead. Indeed, it was the sheer scale of the challenge that finally persuaded Mr Carney that it was worth doing.Read more...
Daily Telegraph: Carney-mania takes hold(05 of10)
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Is there any stopping Carney-mania? Those of us who 24 hours ago couldn't have identified Mark Carney, even if he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "I'm the Governor of the Canadian Central Bank" in 110pt type, now stroke our chins and swap our best Carney insights. He was voted the most trustworthy Canadian in a poll conducted by Readers Digest (Canada). He has four children. He paid $800,000 for his house in Ottawa, apparently, although he undertook $95,000 of improvements. Did they extend out the back or convert the attic? I don't know, yet. And Canada didn't have a banking crisis, you know. Only it did, in the 1990s, and the recovery and reorganisation put it in place afterwards left it in good shape ahead of the much bigger financial crisis which hit the US and the UK particularly hard. And Canada knows how to regulate its banks, only that wasn't actually Carney's job. This is most of what we know so far.Read more...
Financial Times: Carney bound to disappoint(06 of10)
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The new governor's problem now is that he is bound to disappoint. Unless by some miracle the British economy soon heads towards the sunlit uplands, those now so keen to lavish praise on Mr Carney will start asking whether Britain has got what it paid for. The media will ask awkward questions about his pay and perks; MPs will criticise him at once for not being tough enough on the banks and for choking off credit to small businesses.Read more...
The Independent: An outsider wins(07 of10)
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So who are the City getting in Mr Carney? On paper he's an outsider, although he will seek British citizenship, but a look on his CV shows that the Square Mile is getting one of their own. A 47-year-old former Goldman Sachs veteran of 13 years, doing stints in New York, London, Tokyo and Toronto, he will have no trouble speaking to the bankers in a language they understand. After 10 years of Sir Mervyn and "the MA way", in reference to the monetary analysis unit which held sway as the central bank took on a decidedly academic bent, Chancellor George Osborne is drawing a stark line in the sand and setting a new course for the Bank of England.Read more...
Daily Telegraph: A rift at the BoE?(08 of10)
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Mark Carney, the incoming Governor of the Bank of England, has attacked Andy Haldane, one of its most senior regulators and a rising star, for failing to have a "proper understanding of the facts" on bank regulation...Mr Carney, who is chairman of the global regulator the Financial Stability Board (FSB), criticised Mr Haldane, the Bank's executive director for financial stability, for proposals he made to simplify bank regulation and encourage banks to break up.[Haldane's] proposals ran counter to Mr Carney's work at both the Bank of Canada and the FSB. In an interview last month with Euromoney, Mr Carney said: "I thought Andrew Haldane's speech was uneven... Basle I was simple and it drove us off a cliff. Andrew Haldane's conclusion is not supported by the proper understanding of the facts."Read more...
The Times of London: A political coup(09 of10)
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The appointment of Mark Carney is a political coup. The decision is imaginative while also being safe. It is unusual but not unprecedented to appoint a foreign national to be head of a central bank. Stanley Fischer, Governor of the Bank of Israel, took Israeli nationality and renounced his American citizenship on his appointment. Mr Carney will similarly take British citizenship.Read more...
The Independent: A British failure(10 of10)
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If this appointment is a celebration of Britain's willingness to scour the worldfor people to run our great institutions - from football clubs to car companies - it is also an acknowedgement of our failures. In central banking this is in theory the third most important job in the world, for the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank naturally rank higher. But in practice it is arguably more interesting, partly because it is more wide-ranging, combining bank supervision with monetary responsibility, and artly because London's central role in international finance gives it global significance.Read more...
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