Opinion: Canada is about to discover Mark Carney is the man with the reverse Midas touch
March 13th 2025
The ‘rock star’ former Governor of the Bank of England has left a trail of destruction behind his glossy jobs.
He has global experience. He has proven leadership skills. And he has the connections and the clout needed to steer his country through a perilous moment in its history. As Mark Carney succeeds Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada, he has made much of his credentials as a “rock star” central banker and of his undoubtedly impressive collection of other grand-sounding jobs.
There is just one snag. As it turns out, it takes only a cursory glance at his record to work out that Carney’s reputation is completely overblown. In reality, he has been over-promoted all over again.
If politics was simply a matter of CVs, then Carney would be Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle rolled into one. He is perhaps one of the most qualified men ever to take charge of one of the West’s major democracies. A Goldman Sachs banker by training, he served as Governor of the Bank of Canada, before being persuaded by George Osborne to become the first foreigner to run the Bank of England. Since then, he has distinguished himself as the leader of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, as a UN Climate Change Envoy, as chairman of the asset manager Brookfield, and of the financial news giant Bloomberg. He was, according to Osborne when he appointed him, “the outstanding central banker of his generation”.
But the truth is rather less glamorous. Over eight years at the Bank of England, Carney was at best an indifferent Governor, and, at worse, a disappointing failure. Despite his huge salary of more than £600,000 a year, more than any of his predecessors had been paid, he seemed to have little feel for the role. The City quickly nick-named him “the unreliable boyfriend” for his constant changes of direction on interest rates.
He printed too much money in the wake of the financial crisis, and then repeated the mistake all over again in the wake of the referendum on leaving the EU, responding as if he was in the middle of a financial emergency instead of dealing with a minor blip in trading relations. At the same time, regulatory standards were allowed to slide, and the City started to lose its role as one of the major global financial centres, with over-complex rules deterring companies from listing their shares in London.
By the time he left office, Carney had created a mess which his successors have struggled to clear up. Inflation spiked up to a peak of 11.1 per cent in the UK, compared to 5.2 per cent in France, or 8 per cent in Italy, hardly a country known for controlling prices effectively, largely because the Bank had printed too much money.
As the LDI crisis in 2022 made clear, the Bank has lost its once formidable grasp of the inner workings of the City, and allowed pension funds to build up far too many high-risk assets, triggering a potential collapse of the gilts market that the Bank had to bail out. It had become far more interested in the climate emergency, and in pronouns for staff, than the old-fashioned businesses of keeping an eye on the amount of risk building up in the system.
The years Carney spent running the Bank were characterised by stagnant growth, stalled living standards, and declining productivity, and while there are many explanations for that, the “rock star Governor” clearly did nothing to improve the performance of the British economy.
Even worse, he politicised the role, taking sides on the Brexit debate as one of the main authors of the ludicrously over-blown “Project Fear” when it would have been far better to remain neutral, and then using his authority to endorse Rachel Reeves as Chancellor in a high-profile intervention just before the last general election, praising her energy and vision (a decision he surely regrets, since even many Labour MP’s now concede privately that Reeves has proved hopelessly out of her depth). Time and again, Carney has proved himself a man of high intelligence, but remarkably poor judgement.
It has not gone much better since he left the Bank. Over the last year, his Climate Alliance has started falling apart. Created in the wake of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, it was designed to mobilise the power of private capital to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into accelerating the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Yet in January this year, the Financial Times described the Alliance as “unravelling” as a series of major banks including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citibank pulled out.
Carney is the epitome of a remote, globalised, technocratic elite. He is very good at self-promotion, at collecting trophy jobs, and of course negotiating fabulously generous salaries and expenses for himself along the way. He is just not very good at delivering.
Canada is facing a perilous moment in its history. For reasons best known to himself, President Trump has turned on his northern neighbour, imposing steep tariffs on the country that threaten to wreck its economy. Much like the UK, record levels of immigration mean that GDP per capita has now been falling for six consecutive quarters. Its economic and social model will have to adapt if it is to survive a bitter row with the United States. It will take vision, courage and determination to overcome those challenges, and to steer a new course for the country.
Instead, Canada is going to get a self-regarding technocrat who may have plenty of connections but has left behind a trail of wreckage in every major job he has ever held. Carney may get a short term boost in the polls as he takes office, and may even win the general election later this year. Sure, PM will look good at the CV. But Canada will pay a high price for feeding his ego.
NEWS PROVIDED BY
Telegraph, Matthew Lynn
telegraph.co.uk
He has global experience. He has proven leadership skills. And he has the connections and the clout needed to steer his country through a perilous moment in its history. As Mark Carney succeeds Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada, he has made much of his credentials as a “rock star” central banker and of his undoubtedly impressive collection of other grand-sounding jobs.
There is just one snag. As it turns out, it takes only a cursory glance at his record to work out that Carney’s reputation is completely overblown. In reality, he has been over-promoted all over again.
If politics was simply a matter of CVs, then Carney would be Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle rolled into one. He is perhaps one of the most qualified men ever to take charge of one of the West’s major democracies. A Goldman Sachs banker by training, he served as Governor of the Bank of Canada, before being persuaded by George Osborne to become the first foreigner to run the Bank of England. Since then, he has distinguished himself as the leader of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, as a UN Climate Change Envoy, as chairman of the asset manager Brookfield, and of the financial news giant Bloomberg. He was, according to Osborne when he appointed him, “the outstanding central banker of his generation”.
But the truth is rather less glamorous. Over eight years at the Bank of England, Carney was at best an indifferent Governor, and, at worse, a disappointing failure. Despite his huge salary of more than £600,000 a year, more than any of his predecessors had been paid, he seemed to have little feel for the role. The City quickly nick-named him “the unreliable boyfriend” for his constant changes of direction on interest rates.
He printed too much money in the wake of the financial crisis, and then repeated the mistake all over again in the wake of the referendum on leaving the EU, responding as if he was in the middle of a financial emergency instead of dealing with a minor blip in trading relations. At the same time, regulatory standards were allowed to slide, and the City started to lose its role as one of the major global financial centres, with over-complex rules deterring companies from listing their shares in London.
By the time he left office, Carney had created a mess which his successors have struggled to clear up. Inflation spiked up to a peak of 11.1 per cent in the UK, compared to 5.2 per cent in France, or 8 per cent in Italy, hardly a country known for controlling prices effectively, largely because the Bank had printed too much money.
As the LDI crisis in 2022 made clear, the Bank has lost its once formidable grasp of the inner workings of the City, and allowed pension funds to build up far too many high-risk assets, triggering a potential collapse of the gilts market that the Bank had to bail out. It had become far more interested in the climate emergency, and in pronouns for staff, than the old-fashioned businesses of keeping an eye on the amount of risk building up in the system.
The years Carney spent running the Bank were characterised by stagnant growth, stalled living standards, and declining productivity, and while there are many explanations for that, the “rock star Governor” clearly did nothing to improve the performance of the British economy.
Even worse, he politicised the role, taking sides on the Brexit debate as one of the main authors of the ludicrously over-blown “Project Fear” when it would have been far better to remain neutral, and then using his authority to endorse Rachel Reeves as Chancellor in a high-profile intervention just before the last general election, praising her energy and vision (a decision he surely regrets, since even many Labour MP’s now concede privately that Reeves has proved hopelessly out of her depth). Time and again, Carney has proved himself a man of high intelligence, but remarkably poor judgement.
It has not gone much better since he left the Bank. Over the last year, his Climate Alliance has started falling apart. Created in the wake of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, it was designed to mobilise the power of private capital to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into accelerating the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Yet in January this year, the Financial Times described the Alliance as “unravelling” as a series of major banks including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citibank pulled out.
Carney is the epitome of a remote, globalised, technocratic elite. He is very good at self-promotion, at collecting trophy jobs, and of course negotiating fabulously generous salaries and expenses for himself along the way. He is just not very good at delivering.
Canada is facing a perilous moment in its history. For reasons best known to himself, President Trump has turned on his northern neighbour, imposing steep tariffs on the country that threaten to wreck its economy. Much like the UK, record levels of immigration mean that GDP per capita has now been falling for six consecutive quarters. Its economic and social model will have to adapt if it is to survive a bitter row with the United States. It will take vision, courage and determination to overcome those challenges, and to steer a new course for the country.
Instead, Canada is going to get a self-regarding technocrat who may have plenty of connections but has left behind a trail of wreckage in every major job he has ever held. Carney may get a short term boost in the polls as he takes office, and may even win the general election later this year. Sure, PM will look good at the CV. But Canada will pay a high price for feeding his ego.
NEWS PROVIDED BY
Telegraph, Matthew Lynn
telegraph.co.uk
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