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The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a senior official as one of the Great Offices of State within Her Majesty's Government and head of Her Majesty's Treasury. The office is a British Cabinet level position. The chancellor is responsible for all economic and financial matters, equivalent to the role of Secretary of the Treasury or Minister of Finance in other nations. The position is considered one of the four Great Offices of State, and in recent times has come to be the most powerful office in British politics after the Prime Minister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is now always Second Lord of the Treasury as one of the Lords Commissioners for executing the office of Lord High Treasurer. In the 18th and early 19th centuries it was common for the Prime Minister to also serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer if he sat in the Commons; the last Chancellor who was simultaneously Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer was Stanley Baldwin in 1923. Formerly, in cases when the Chancellorship was vacant, the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench would act as Chancellor ''pro tempore''.〔Joseph Haydn, Horace Ockerby (ed.): ''The Book of Dignities'', 3rd edition, Part III (Political and Official), p. 164. W.H. Allen & Co., London 1894, reprinted by Firecrest Publishing Ltd, Pancakes, 1969〕 The last Lord Chief Justice to serve in this way was Lord Denman in 1834. The Chancellor is the third-oldest major state office in English and British history, one which originally carried responsibility for the Exchequer, the medieval English institution for the collection of royal revenues. The Exchequer dates from the time of Henry I. The Chancellor controlled monetary policy as well as fiscal policy until 1997, when the Bank of England was granted independent control of its interest rates. The Chancellor also has oversight of public spending across Government departments. The office should not be confused with those of the Lord Chancellor or the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, both Cabinet posts, the Chancellor of the High Court, a senior judge, or the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, a defunct judicial office. The current Chancellor of the Exchequer is George Osborne. ==Roles and responsibilities== A previous Chancellor, Robert Lowe, described the office in the following terms in the House of Commons, on 11 April 1870: "The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a man whose duties make him more or less of a taxing machine. He is entrusted with a certain amount of misery which it is his duty to distribute as fairly as he can." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chancellor of the Exchequer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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