Jonathan Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell (born 5 October 1955) is a British businessman and academic and was Chairman of the Financial Services Authority until its abolition in March 2013. He is a former Chairman of the Pensions Commission and the Committee on Climate Change, as well as a former Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry. He has described himself in a BBC HARDtalk interview with Stephen Sackur as a 'technocrat'. He is a vocal advocate of monetary financing and "helicopter money" whereby central banks would directly finance government spending or cash distribution to citizens. Since 2010, he has written monthly opinion columns on economic and regulatory policy for Project Syndicate. Early life Adair Turner was born in Ipswich. He grew up in Crawley and East Kilbride (both new towns. His father Geoffrey was a University of Liverpool-educated town planner). Adair attended Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow, then moved to Glenalmond College. He studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he took a Double first in History and Economics and became President of the Cambridge Union. He was also Chairman of the University's Conservative Association. He joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. Business career He taught economics part-time after university. His career with BP started in 1979 and he worked for Chase Manhattan Bank from 1979 to 1982. He became a director of McKinsey & Co in 1994 after joining in 1982. Turner was Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) from 1995 to 1999. In this role he became one of the leading proponents of British membership of the euro – a stance he later said was mistaken. From 2000 to 2006 he was Vice-Chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe. He lectures part-time at the London School of Economics, where in 2010 he delivered three lectures on "Economics after the Crisis", later published by MIT Press as a book under that title: this criticised conventional wisdom that the object of policy should be to maximise GDP, that the way to do this is to promote freer markets, and that inequality is an acceptable price for growth. In 2002, he chaired a UK government enquiry into pensions. In 2007, he succeeded Frances Cairncross as Chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council and Baroness Jay as Chair of the Overseas Development Institute's Council. In 2008 his Building a Low-carbon Economy (co-written with David Kennedy) was