A response to Dr Nadeem Ul Haque’s “Who built the field?” and “The saver pays”

Dr Nadeem Ul Haque has returned to these pages with two parts and, as ever, with arguments worth engaging. This response came quickly, and the quick turnaround is itself a small story about how such work has changed: the arguments were already formed in my head — formed by years of practice and reading — and AI did in an evening the legwork a team of researchers would once have taken a fortnight over. My dependence on borrowed hands for evidence is eroding; what remains scarce is the prompting — knowing which questions to ask — and the checking of every answer before it reaches print.

First, the concessions, because they are quietly large against his initial op-ed. The word cartel has been retired: a protected oligopoly, he now argues, needs no secret meetings. Raast works. Bank balance sheets are sound. The taxes are heavy and the compliance rules were not written in Karachi.

What remains is a single new claim on which both his latest writer-ups rest: that bankers built the field — that they have run the finance ministry, sat on the central bank’s board and staffed the regulators for about twenty-five years.

That is an empirical claim, and it can be tested against three things the columns never seem to consult: the statute, the register, and his own data.

Start with the room he says bankers sit in. Under Section 13(f) of the State Bank of Pakistan Act, as amended in 2022, any person who is a director, officer or employee of a bank — or of any entity the State Bank regulates — is disqualified from serving as Governor, Deputy Governor, non-executive director of the Board, or external member of the Monetary Policy Committee. Section 13(g) goes further: even a shareholder of a bank is disqualified.

A serving banker, or a sponsor of a bank, cannot sit on the State Bank’s Board or its Monetary Policy Committee; the law forbids it, and the reason the law gives is precisely the one Dr Haque worries about — conflict of interest.

The one room his argument names is locked, by statute. If the residual claim is that former bankers appear in public roles, so do former economists, and former judges, generals and bureaucrats; a résumé is not a conspiracy. And his cooling-off remedy already exists: Section 16A of the same Act bars those very office-holders from employment with any institution the State Bank regulates for two years after they leave, and the record suggests the discipline has not been compromised. If it needs further strengthening, I co-sign wholeheartedly.

Next, the helm itself. Since August 1947, thirty-one individuals have held Pakistan’s finance portfolio as ministers, caretakers or portfolio-holding advisers. Exactly three were commercial bankers, and their combined tenure is thirteen of seventy-nine years: about one year in six. Of the rest, six were economists, holding roughly twelve years between them — about one in seven — and the remaining twenty-two, of every other background, held some fifty-four years: nearly seven in ten. One comparison deserves a word: economists, the discipline from which the charge is pressed, held the portfolio barely less long than the bankers did.

The State Bank’s register reads the same way: six of its governors since 1948 were........

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