Mark Carney, who has said he is considering a run to replace Justin Trudeau as Canada’s prime minister, spent seven years in the UK as the Bank of England governor.
Carney was headhunted in 2013 by the then chancellor, George Osborne, after serving as the governor of the Bank of Canada, and was known at the time by the unlikely epithet of “rock star central banker”.
He remains an influential figure on the global economic stage, and Rachel Reeves hailed his endorsement at the 2023 Labour conference – given by video message – as the party sought to present itself as economically credible. Carney called Reeves a “serious economist” who “understands the economics of work, of place and family”.
Carney arrived in London determined to bring change to the stuffy Bank. He introduced plastic banknotes, and a new approach to communication known as “forward guidance”, which was meant to give investors a clearer idea of which way interest rates were heading.
The former innovation proved more immediately successful than the latter. After the Bank was seen as sending out mixed signals on rates, Carney was memorably accused of being an “unreliable boyfriend” by the Labour MP Pat McFadden – then a member of the Treasury select committee, now a powerful Cabinet Office minister.
Carney also waded into the fractious debate over Brexit, repeatedly warning about the risks to the economy of leaving the EU – leading to accusations that he had politicised the independent Bank.
In the event, the economy avoided recession in the aftermath of the unexpected vote for Brexit in June 2016 – helped in part by the Bank’s response, which included cutting interest rates and boosting its bond-buying programme, known as quantitative easing.
Carney began his banking career with 13 years at the US lender Goldman Sachs before taking the helm at Canada’s central bank in 2007.
Since leaving the Bank of England, he has continued to write and work on an area he emphasised as governor: the need for financial markets to catch up with the risks of the climate crisis. In a much-quoted speech from 2015, he warned that efforts to tackle global heating were compromised by “the tragedy of the horizon” – politicians’ and markets’ inability to look beyond the next few years.
In his 2021 book Value(s) – subtitled “An Economist’s Guide to Everything that Matters” – Carney enlarged on the idea, and attacked finance-driven capitalism more broadly, for losing sight of society’s needs.
Now 59, Carney is the chair of the Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management, which has $1tn (£800bn) under management. Since 2023 he has also been the chair of Bloomberg’s board.
Carney has repeatedly been mooted as a potential successor to Trudeau, who announced his resignation on Monday. If he did win the leadership, he would face what is expected to be a tough election battle.
The former Bank governor, who has four daughters, told the Financial Times he “will be considering this decision closely with my family over the coming days”.
