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Desert Island Discs

Dame Minouche Shafik

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.413.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2018

⏱️ 36 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dame Minouche Shafik is the director of the London School of Economics and a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She was born in Egypt but her family had to flee the country when she was four years old, because her parents lost everything during President Nasser's nationalisation programme. Her father, a scientist, found work in America, and Minouche and her sister attended numerous schools there, before she went back to Egypt at the age of 16. She trained as an economist, studying at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the London School of Economics before receiving her doctorate at Oxford. Minouche Shafik was the youngest ever Vice President of the World Bank, at the age of 36. She later served as the Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011. She joined the Bank of England as its first Deputy Governor on Markets in 2014, and was a member of the bank's monetary policy committee. She became a Dame in the 2015 June Birthday Honours list. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is the BBC.

0:30.7

Hello, I'm Christy Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs where every week I ask my

0:35.7

guest to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with

0:40.5

them if they were cast away on a desert island. For rights reasons, the music on these podcast

0:46.6

versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen

0:53.2

to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.

1:15.7

My cast away this week is the economist, Dame Manouche-Shafique. She took up her position as Director

1:21.6

of the London School of Economics last autumn. At a time when global growth forecasts were being

1:26.4

upgraded and the worldwide economy was basking in what those of her ilk refer to as a welcome

1:31.4

cyclical upturn. However, given the extent of her experience, she likely took a rather sanguine

1:36.8

view of those passing events. A one-time deputy governor of the Bank of England and before that the

1:41.8

youngest ever vice president of the World Bank, she has seen bubbles, bull markets and crashes come and

1:47.3

go. She also knows, from bitter family experience, the impact a country's economic fortunes has on

1:53.7

its citizens. In the mid-60s, her once well-to-do family fled Egypt penniless after President

2:00.4

Nasser's nationalization program. She says, most of human progress has come from the application of

2:07.2

expertise to human problems. And I think the current dismissal of expertise is very troubling.

2:13.2

Experts lost a lot of credibility after the financial crisis. People said,

2:16.8

you told us this system was fine and then it blows up. You'll be used to that, say,

2:21.2

Minishifika. Is it partly also to do with the fact that experts maybe up until then and even

2:27.0

now it's starting again have oversold what they can tell us about the world and what they can

2:31.7

predict? That would be fair. It would be fair. Some experts pretended that they could predict the

2:37.4

future and probably expressed more certainty about their forecast than was merited. Having said

...

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