Sir Howard Davis is a worried man. He is concerned about political polarization. He is concerned about the long-term impact of Brexit on the City of London. And he is concerned about opposing globalization.
One thing he is not particularly worried about is the health of the bank he chairs, NatWest, which in its former form as the Royal Bank of Scotland was on the verge of collapse during the 2008 global financial crisis.
Davis has been chairman of NatWest for seven years and the turning point in the bank’s fortune, he said, was to pay a $ 4.9 billion (£ 3.6 billion) fine to US authorities in 2018 for her role in the mortgage crisis on mortgages. Until now, NatWest has been “climbing behind the couch” to raise capital, but is now in better financial shape than many comparable European banks and has managed to expand. According to him, it was a “two-half game”.
The football metaphor is telling because Davis has another concern. As a lifelong Manchester City fan, he fears his team will be taken out of the Liverpool Premier League title in the last round of matches on Sunday. To mitigate
CV
71 years
Family Married to a missing journalist. Two sons, one left, one right.
Bowker Vale education is basic; high school in Manchester; Memorial University of Newfoundland; Merton College, Oxford; Stanford Business School.
Pay “Simple answers are ‘enough’ or ‘no comment’, but £ 750,000 is published in NatWest accounts.”
Last vacation Cycling on a section of the Rhine. “I’ll finish it one day.”
The best advice he was given: “Always show that you can do your boss’s job if necessary.”
The biggest mistake in his career “Consent to be director of the LSE. Finish with tears. “
He goes too far with the word “Guardiola,” as in “We Have Guardiola,” sung to the tune of Glad All Over.
How to relax. He plays cricket and listens to pianist Brad Meldau: “Usually not at the same time.”
potential agony, he bet £ 100 at 8-1 for Liverpool, adding the title and the Champions League to the FA and Carabao cups already won.
This is an “emotional hedge”, he admits as he discusses a half-century career in the Foreign Office, the Treasury and the Bank of England and was Britain’s top financial regulator, CBI CEO, consultant in management and head of the investigation of the capacity of the airport in the United Kingdom.
Asked which of his many jobs he likes best, he chooses none of the ones listed above, but the full ones to run the Audit Committee (later abolished by the David Cameron government), which checks whether local authorities provide a price-performance ratio. quality.
“It was an exciting job. I found that you can make significant improvements in local services, where the variations were absolutely huge. It was really interesting and rewarding, and you could actually see that you were making a difference. “
Far less pleasant was the end of Davis’ tenure as director of the London School of Economics, after concerns were expressed about the school’s decision to accept funding from a foundation controlled by Muammar Gaddafi’s son.
Davis says he never asked for the money himself and thought something was wrong with the deal, but said he should have noticed the potential for problems. “There is no doubt that I made a mistake. I should have stopped it, but I didn’t. “
His latest project is a book, The Chancellors, published by Polity Press, on the Treasury’s role in managing the economy of every chancellor from Gordon Brown to Rishi Sunak.
Davis was put in charge of the Brown Financial Services Authority when supervision was lifted by the newly independent Bank of England in 1997, and he was later criticized for failing to impose harsh measures against City during the the rise to the catastrophe of 2008. “At the time, people were moaning that financial regulation was too strict and that I was a judge and jury in my own court,” he said. “I was accused of being a superpower regulator that interfered with” animal spirits. ” There has never been any criticism in the other direction. “
Asked which of the last chancellors has the most time, Davis chooses Alistair Darling, whose three years in the Treasury between 2007 and 2010 were dominated by the bank collapse.
“Alistair had a terrible hand to play. He had no money, no financial crisis and no predecessor as his boss. There was nothing Alistair didn’t know that Gordon didn’t know. And yet he was completely unstoppable. “
This prime minister hated the finance ministry in part because of his pro-European views. But when he gets into a hole, who else but the Treasury can save him? Howard Davis
When he began writing the book, Davis was convinced that he would conclude that the Ministry of Finance should be divided into separate financial and economic departments, the model preferred by most other European countries. He has since changed his mind. “A little checking and balance in our system is a very good idea,” he says. “If we shared responsibilities and had a department for economic affairs and a ministry for the budget, they would be less powerful than the Ministry of Finance combined, and that would give № 10 freedom. That would be a mistake.
“This prime minister hated the Ministry of Finance partly because of his pro-European views or perceived pro-European views and role in the referendum. But when he falls into a hole, who else but the Treasury can save him?
If Davis is optimistic about the outlook for NatWest, he is less positive about what the future holds for the UK. “I am actually quite pessimistic. Brexit was a serious mistake. You are not solving the problems of the abandoned by damaging the only region of the country that wrote the checks. London pays large sums of taxes and will be harmed by Brexit over time.
“I am worried about political polarization. The same thing is happening in France [Davies teaches in Paris] and in the United States. It’s probably less bad here than in the United States or France, but I feel a bit of bitterness in public life that doesn’t create a good environment for rational solutions to problems.
Davis says that when he first came to London from Manchester in the 1970s, the capital was “dark” and “monochrome”, but later became a bustling, multi-racial city. He fears the pendulum may swing in the other direction. “China is seceding from the United States and there is this war [in Ukraine]. London is a beneficiary of globalization, and if it turns around, maybe the global city has passed its peak. “
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