Adair Turner

Adair Turner   (businessman, academic)
Born	5 October 1955
Nationality	UK
Alma mater	Hutchesons' Grammar School, Glenalmond College, Gonville and Caius College (Cambridge)
Member of	British-American Project, Centre for European Reform, Franco-British Colloque, Group of Thirty, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Königswinter/Speakers, WEF/Global Leaders for Tomorrow/1996
Interests	• Social Democratic Party (UK) • universal basic income • Institute for New Economic Thinking • George Soros
Front man for George Soros-initiatives.  Director of the Confederation of British Industry In office 1995 - 1999  Chairman of Institute for New Economic Thinking In office 2013 - January 2019

Jonathan Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell is a British businessman.

He was Chairman of the Financial Services Authority until its abolition in March 2013. He is a former Chairman of the Pensions Commission and the Committee on Climate Change, as well as a former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry.

He is closely connected to several George Soros-financed initiatives. He is vocal advocate several ideas pushed by the richest people in the world fitting with their Agenda 2030, including universal basic income and a low-carbon economy to reduce climate change.

Since 2010, he has written monthly opinion columns on economic and regulatory policy for Project Syndicate, which is a Soros-financed website offering 'free' op-eds to corporate media.

In April 2013, it was announced that Turner would be joining George Soros' economic think tank Institute for New Economic Thinking as a senior research fellow in its London offices.

Early life

His father Geoffrey was a town planner. Adair attended Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow, then moved to Glenalmond College. He later went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he took a Double first in History and Economics and became President of the Cambridge Union. He was also Chairman of the University's Conservative Association. He joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981, a well-financed initative designed to split the Labour vote.

Business career

He taught economics part-time after university. His career with BP started in 1979 and he worked for Chase Manhattan Bank from 1979 to 1982. He became a director of McKinsey & Co in 1994 after joining in 1982. Between 1992-95 he built the McKinsey’s practice in Eastern Europe and Russia, where he might have come in touch with the Soros interests.

Turner was Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) from 1995 to 1999. In this role he became one of the leading proponents of British membership of the euro – a stance he later said was mistaken. From 2000 to 2006 he was Vice-Chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe.

He lectures part-time at the London School of Economics, where in 2010 he delivered three lectures on "Economics after the Crisis", later published by MIT Press as a book under that title: this criticized conventional wisdom that the object of policy should be to maximize GDP, that the way to do this is to promote freer markets, and that inequality is an acceptable price for growth.

In 2002, he chaired a UK government enquiry into pensions. In 2007, he succeeded Frances Cairncross as Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council and Baroness Jay as Chair of the Overseas Development Institute's Council.

In 2008 his Building a Low-carbon Economy (co-written with David Kennedy) was published, and the same year Turner was appointed as first Chairman of the British Government's newly established Committee on Climate Change. He stepped down from this position in Spring 2012.

On 29 May 2008, it was announced that he would take over as Chairman of the Financial Services Authority. He took up this post on 20 September 2008 for a five-year term to succeed Callum McCarthy.

Financial Services Authority

Turner defended the actions of the regulator on the BBC's Andrew Marr show on 15 February 2009, saying that other regulatory bodies throughout the world, which varied in structure and lightness of regulatory touch, also failed to predict the economic collapse. He said that in line with other regulators the FSA had failed intellectually by focusing too much on processes and procedures rather than looking at the bigger economic picture. Asked why Sir James Crosby had been appointed deputy chairman when the FSA had said that his bank HBOS was using risky lending practices, Lord Turner said that they had files on almost every financial institution indicating a degree of risk.

He did not apologise for the actions of the FSA, which had presided over the near-total collapse of several major banks, and accepted that it had not foreseen the consequences for Lloyds Bank of its merger with the ailing HBOS in September 2008. Despite controversy over bonuses for employees of Lloyds, he sought to justify bonuses averaging 15 per cent for his own 2,500 staff, arguing "If you're saying we should now cut the bonuses [of FSA employees], you're saying you should cut their pay by 15%".

In August 2009 in an interview for Prospect magazine he supported the idea of new global taxes on financial transactions (the "Tobin tax"), warning that a "swollen" financial sector paying excessive salaries had grown too big for society.

In April 2013, it was announced that Turner would be joining George Soros' economic think tank Institute for New Economic Thinking as a senior research fellow in its London offices.

He is a vocal advocate of monetary financing and "helicopter money" whereby central banks would directly finance government spending or cash distribution to citizens.

Global Apollo Programme

In 2015, he was co-author of the report that launched the Global Apollo Programme, which calls for developed nations to commit to spending 0.02% of their GDP for 10 years, to fund co-ordinated research to make carbon-free baseload electricity less costly than electricity from coal by the year 2025.

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
WEF/Annual Meeting/2004	21 January 2004	25 January 2004	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2068 billionaires, CEOs and their politicians and "civil society" leaders met under the slogan Partnering for Prosperity and Security. "We have the people who matter," said World Economic Forum Co-Chief Executive Officer José María Figueres.
WEF/Annual Meeting/2009	23 January 2009	27 January 2009	World Economic Forum Switzerland	Chairman Klaus Schwab outlined five objectives driving the Forum’s efforts to shape the global agenda, including letting the banks that caused the 2008 economic crisis keep writing the rules, the climate change agenda, over-national government structures, taking control over businesses with the stakeholder agenda, and a "new charter for the global economic order".
WEF/Annual Meeting/2011	26 January 2011	30 January 2011	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2229 guests in Davos, with the theme: "Shared Norms for the New Reality".
WEF/Annual Meeting/2013	23 January 2013	27 January 2013	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2500 mostly unelected leaders met to discuss "leading through adversity"
WEF/Annual Meeting/2014	22 January 2014	25 January 2014	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2604 guests in Davos considered "Reshaping The World"
WEF/Annual Meeting/2019	22 January 2019	25 January 2019	World Economic Forum Switzerland
WEF/Annual Meeting/2020	21 January 2020	24 January 2020	Switzerland	This mega-summit of the world's ruling class and their political and media appendages happens every year, but 2020 was special, as the continuous corporate media coverage of COVID-19 started more or less from one day to the next on 20/21 January 2020, coinciding with the start of the meeting.

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