Gordon Brown
"Gordon Brown famously changed the method of inflation measurement that he was going to use to uprate benefits, tax bands and so on, from one that included housing costs (RPI) to one that didn't (CPI) in the middle of a housing boom."
The benefits part was only the minor problem. The big one was offloading interest rate policy to the BoE & then instructing them to base it on this same inflation measurement. So in the middle of a housing bubble interest rates were managed by a committee with their fingers super-glued in their ears going "Can't here anything. La la la".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
