If you really insist, I'll be the next Bank governor It's a rotten job, but someone's got to do it. All those endless speeches, mostly telling us not to be so sad and glum, there's bound to be far worse to come; far too many lunches and dinners; quarterly grillings by those masters of hindsight in the financial press, and (worst of all) having to listen to smug bankers warning that if you threaten their bonuses, they'll take it out on the customers. Yes, it's time for applications to be the next governor of the Bank of England. Not a great start to advertise the post in The Economist, since one thing the BoE doesn't need is more of them. Indeed, there's a good case for economising on economists, a trade where demand seems to grow as their ability to forecast deteriorates. Remember the "output gap" which the BoE insisted was going to bring growth up and inflation down? No, they would rather you didn't, either. Inside London I would tell the BoE economists who survived my axe to get out more and remember that they practise a highly inexact science. They should bear in mind the adage that if a figure looks wrong, it probably is. Forecasting is hard but a glance at inflation in Britain over the past 30 years provides a clue: it's never going to be as low as your computer models predict. It's too late to stop the current tide of legislation but, as three Banking Acts and two financial services acts since 1997 haven't done the trick, it's probably the wrong approach. Instead, today's system, which rewards bankers for screwing the customers, must change. In the next decade, digital technology promises to allow banks to make money from services which customers really value, rather than, as now, force-feeding them with products they neither want nor need. This will require new thinking at the top. Unfortunately, this week's bromide from Barclays" new chief executive Antony Jenkins promising to make "ethical behaviour" a priority rather gives the game away, and betrays how bankers still have to understand the impact of this disruptive technology. Decent market intelligence is worth a thousand pages of regulation, which is why I would urge the chancellor to appoint people with market knowledge to the Monetary Policy Committee. Nobody who can remember the UK government being forced to pay 15.5 per cent for 20-year money would ever claim that QE can be reversed at the first sign of inflation, as MPC member David Miles did this week. Rather, I would write off the £375bn of gilts the BoE has bought in. Wiping out a quarter of the national debt would cheer us up no end. Every executive should understand Goodhart's Law. It states, roughly, that if you rely on a statistic it will mislead you, as inflation-targeting led us astray in the last decade. My colleague John Kay this week extended the law to state that if you set targets, then hitting them will become more important than doing the job. Finally, when Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York, he was asked: "What's the first thing you would do if you're elected?" "Demand a recount," he shot back.