Bank governor shows confidence in the system
IT WAS FRANCE’S wartime resistance leader and later president, Charles de Gaulle, who lamented how difficult effective governance was in a nation that has 246 varieties of cheese.
Pakistan’s new central bank governor, Dr Shamshad Akhtar, would sympathize with the French general as she makes her way to her office in the State Bank of Pakistan building on Karachi’s chaotic II Chundrigar Road, Pakistan’s Wall Street, which the British Raj traders used to know as Macleod Rd.
In just one kilometre of the mercantile mayhem that the 53-year-old Akhtar has presided over in the year since her appointment, there suddenly seem to be as many banks in Pakistan as France has regional cheeses – Al Baraka Islamic Bank, Union Bank, Soneri Bank, Wall Street Exchange, Habib Bank, Indus Bank, Atlas Bank, National Industrial Bank, Kazbank,...
