RTRS: Bank of England's King sees little sign of UK recovery
(Reuters) - Britain's stagnant economy is showing little sign that it is about to recover, due largely to the damaging effect of the euro zone debt crisis on businesses' investment and exports, Bank of England governor Mervyn King said in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.
"The economy has basically been flat for two years and doesn't show a great deal of signs of impending recovery," King said in a BBC radio interview conducted late on Monday.
"I am worried about the outlook for exports because sterling has risen over the past year and that's going to be a challenge and because of the state of euro area," he added.
King also reiterated his view that investment banking and retail banking should not take place under the same roof, and that Britain suffered from a harmful lack of competition between its major banks.
"We need to separate as far as we can the normal basic banking activities that apply to households and small businesses from the investment banking activities and we need to introduce more competition into our banking sector," he said.
Details of a government- and BoE-backed 'funding for lending' scheme to incentivize bank lending announced last month would be published "very shortly", King added.
(Reporting by David Milliken and Sven Egenter, additional reporting by Sophie Kirby and Venetia Rainey)
