Henry Thornton Lecture - The Peculiar Mandate: Reflecting on the Nature of Prudential Supervision

This year's Henry Thornton Lecture will be delivered by Sam Woods, Deputy Governor for Prudential Regulation and Chief Executive Officer of the Prudential Regulation Authority at the Bank of England.

In this lecture, he will reflect on the nature of banking supervision, examining how and why the state’s oversight of the banking sector differs from the approach to other sectors of the economy. Tracing how supervision has evolved over time in the UK and US, he will discuss how we might characterise the unusual job of the banking supervisor, and provide some considerations as to how this role might evolve in future.

Sam Woods, Deputy Governor for Prudential Regulation and Chief Executive Officer of the Prudential Regulation Authority at the Bank of England

Sam Woods assumed the role of Deputy Governor for Prudential Regulation and Chief Executive Officer of the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) on 1 July 2016. As Deputy Governor for Prudential Regulation and CEO of the PRA, Sam Woods is also a member of the Bank’s Court of Directors, the Prudential Regulation Committee, the Financial Policy Committee, and the Board of the Financial Conduct Authority.

Sam’s previous role was Executive Director of Insurance at the PRA. In this role, Sam was responsible for overseeing the monitoring and regulation of over 600 life and general insurance firms. Sam joined the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in 2011 and transferred to the Bank in 2013 with the integration of the PRA. He served as Director for Financial Stability Strategy and Risk, and prior to that was Director for Domestic UK Banks Supervision.  Before joining the FSA/Bank, Sam spent ten years at HM Treasury in a variety of senior roles.

Henry Thornton Lecture Series

Hosted by the Centre for Banking Research, the Henry Thornton Lecture was inaugurated in 1979 in the belief that no student of money and banking should be unfamiliar with the name and work of this 19th Century economist and banker.

Renowned for a dozen different insights into the British monetary system during the Napoleonic era, Henry Thornton is best known for his one book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802). Over nearly half century the focus for this lecture has been monetary theory and monetary policy.