Former Fed chief and ex-editor join King at FPC

A former editor of the Financial Times was today named alongside a professor, a banker and an ex-vice chairman of the Federal Reserve as external members of the interim Financial Policy Committee (FPC).

Sir Richard Lambert, Alastair Clark, Michael Cohrs and Donald Kohn will join the FPC, which will be chaired by Bank of England (BoE) governor Mervyn King.

The government and the BoE have brought together the group ahead of legislation which will create a permanent FPC to ensure the stability of the financial system as a whole.

A lack of a macro-prudential overview to enable the spotting of dangerous financial trends has been highlighted by the government as one of the main flaws of the current regulatory framework.

Who's who at the FPC?

The interim FPC board will feature members with a wide mix of backgrounds and experience, including an ex-editor, former Fed chief, a professor and a banker.

Kohn, a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, is a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Cohrs spent 10 years at Goldman Sachs in New York and London from 1981 to 1991. He was then on various management boards at Deutsche Bank, including co-head of corporate and investment banking, from which he only retired in September 2010

Lambert was editor of the Financial Times from 1991 to 2001. From 2003 to 2006 he was on the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. He was also director general of the CBI from 2006 to January this year.

Clark has worked at the Bank of England as executive director for financial stability and as an adviser. He left in early 2007 but was asked by Mervyn King, to return later in the year to help respond to the worsening financial crisis. Since mid-2009 he has been a senior adviser to the Treasury and is an honorary visiting professor at London's Cass Business School.

As previously announced, the other members of the interim FPC are:

• - the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, as chair;
• - the Bank of England's deputy governor for financial stability, Paul Tucker
• the Bank of England's Deputy Governor for Monetary Policy, Charlie Bean;
• - the chief executive of the FSA, Hector Sants (in his capacity as future deputy governor for prudential regulation of the Bank and chief executive of the Prudential Regulation Authority);
• - the Chairman of the FSA, Adair Turner;
• - the Bank of England's executive director for Financial Stability, Andy Haldane; and
• - the Bank of England's Executive Director for Markets, Paul Fisher.

There are also two non-voting members:

• - the chief-executive-designate of the Financial Conduct Authority (formerly known as the consumer protection and markets authority), Martin Wheatley; and
• a Treasury member.