Early Life and Pre-Bank Career
Mervyn King is the son of Eric King, a railway worker who retrained as a geography teacher after the war, and Kathleen (née Passingham). He was born in Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire and studied at Warstones Junior School Wolverhampton and then on to Wolverhampton Grammar School, King's College, Cambridge (gaining a first-class degree in Economics in 1969; MA), St John's College, Cambridge, and Harvard (as a Kennedy Scholar). Whilst at Cambridge, King was Treasurer of the Cambridge University Liberal Club in 1968.
After graduation he worked as a researcher on the Cambridge Growth Project with future Nobel Laureate Richard Stone and Terry Barker at the University of Cambridge. He then taught at the University of Birmingham and was a Visiting Professor at Harvard and MIT where he shared an office with then Assistant Professor Ben Bernanke. From October 1984 he was Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics where he founded the Financial Markets Group. In 1981, he was one of the 364 economists who signed a letter to The Times condemning Geoffrey Howe's 1981 Budget.
Read more about this topic: Mervyn King (economist)
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