Maggie Pagano interviews Mervyn King, the former Governor of the Bank of England whose tenure spanned the global financial crash, about the government’s response to rescue the economy and why it’s impossible to predict how and when the country will recover from the crisis.  

As Lord King points out in his timely new book with economist John Kay, trying to predict the future with mathematical modelling is a fool’s errand. Indeed, the authors argue in Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future, that forecasting future events with numbers is not just foolish but fraudulent, as probabilities do not exist, and probabilities are unknowable.