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Lord Turner speech at Mansion House; ENGLAND: London: Mansion House: INT Lord Turner (Adair Turner) (Chairman, Financial Services Authority) speech SOT **Speech transcript - check against delivery** - This is my fourth speech at this annual dinner and will be the last speech here by any FSA Chairman. Sometime in spring next year the new regulatory regime will be in place. So I want to reflect this evening both on the last four years, and on the FSA since its creation in 1999, but also on the financial services industry over those last 13 years. My time at the FSA started amid crisis. I became Chairman on Saturday 20 September 2008: the previous Monday, Lehmans had collapsed, on Tuesday AIG, on Wednesday the HBOS/Lloyds Bank merger had been announced. The following week the Icelandic banks collapsed, then Bradford & Bingley, and within three weeks we had part nationalised RBS and HBOS to prevent their catastrophic failure. It felt like being appointed captain of the Titanic after we’d hit the iceberg but before we’d actually sunk. Autumn 2008 was dominated by emergency response to the crisis: the subsequent three and a half years by radical change to address the failures that had led to it – changes in global rules, in supervisory approach, and in the FSA’s structure – all amid continued threats to financial stability, and continued recession throughout the developed economies. The contrast with the FSA’s first eight years – from 1999 till the first signs of emerging crisis in summer 2007 – could hardly be greater. In economic terms, the noughties till 2007 seemed what Mervyn King described as the NICE period – ‘non inflationary consistently expansionary’, and political debates were more about how to spend the fruits of growth than about threats to its continuation. as for financial stability, those eight years seemed years of plain sailing and calm seas, with risk indicators such as bank Credit Default Swap spreads reac...