[5][7] While at Harvard, King's academic advisor and mentor was American economist Martin Feldstein who he described as "a very important influence.

He then taught at the University of Birmingham and was a visiting professor at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he shared an office with then-assistant-professor Ben Bernanke.

An ex-officio member of the bank's interest-rate setting Monetary Policy Committee since its inception in 1997, King took part in its monthly meetings.

"[14] Other warnings about the UK housing market followed, including from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in 2004[15] and the OECD in 2005.

[16] King noted the "unusually large" difference between the RPIX and CPI at the beginning of 2004 (the latter does not include house prices as part of its inflation measure, whilst the former does),[17] and, six months later, that UK house prices had risen "to levels which are well above what most people would regard as sustainable in the longer term", having increased by more than 20% over the preceding year and more than 100% over the preceding five.

[32] A former, senior BoE official summed up the bank's pre-crisis performance: "How can you look back with the benefit of hindsight and see it as a success?

[34] By contrast, the United States publishes the Federal Reserve's deliberations with a five-year lag, which have provided "the most detailed picture yet of how top officials at the central bank didn't anticipate the storm about to hit the U.S. economy and the global financial system.

"[35] As in the UK, the US central bank's failure led to a new regulatory framework, the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

[35] King argued that when the financial crisis and bank meltdown hit in autumn 2008, he and other Western central bankers "prevented a Great Depression", in part by cutting interest rates to virtually zero.

[37] The bank has faced criticism, however, for the pace of the rate cuts, which took five months from the beginning of October 2008 to get down from 5.0% to 0.5%, where they remained for several years.

[41] In a The Daily Telegraph interview in March 2011, King said banks had "put profits before people", that failure to reform the sector could result in another financial crisis, and that traditional manufacturing industries have a more "moral" way of operating.

[43] With King's term as governor ending in 2013, top UK banks have warned that unless a less "hostile" figure is found as a successor, they may feel it necessary to move abroad.

[citation needed] It has been alleged that King's Mansion House speech for 2009 helped to bolster the Conservatives during the approach to the general election by issuing high-profile criticisms.

[49] In May 2010, just days after the Coalition government was formed,[50] King said he had spoken to Chancellor George Osborne and supported his plans to cut spending by a further £6 billion within the 2010–11 fiscal year.

[51] In November 2010, it was revealed that some senior staff at the Bank of England (one of them was David Blanchflower)[33] were uncomfortable with King's endorsement of the government's public spending cuts, accusing him of overstepping the boundary between monetary and fiscal policy.

[49] These revelations led to accusations of King being a "coalition courtier"[52] and of making "excessively political"[53] interventions with regard to UK economic policy.

[54][55] As a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures and David Laws' account of the Tory-Lib-Dem coalition-talks, King was asked by the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee to explain why he was seemingly cited in the talks as backing Tory plans to introduce spending cuts this year.

[58] According to George Osborne, Gus O'Donnell made an offer to have King brief the Tories and Lib Dems during the Coalition's formative talks; however, the parties suspected they "knew what he was going to say and .

[59] King was criticised again in May 2012 on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, on the day before an election, after he expressed approval of Coalition austerity measures.

King said that the FPC narrowed its choice of instruments to three—the power to ensure banks have countercyclical capital buffers, the ability to force banks to hold more capital against exposure to specific sectors judged risky, and the power to set leverage ratios—because it will be important to explain to parliament and the wider public why it is or is not using them.

[70] King's wife, Barbara Melander, is a Finnish interior designer and comes from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland.

[8] A fan of Aston Villa F.C., King once arranged a game between Bank of England employees and ex-Villa players.