Mark Carney Quotes

leadership is the acceptance of responsibility rather than the assumption of power.

...just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in financial crises.

The bad outcomes that macroprudential policies prevent have to be estimated. But counterfactuals are difficult to sell: ‘it could have been worse’ doesn’t quite have the ring of ‘you’ve never had it so good’.

leadership

Carney disapproved of criminals who bragged about their cleverness, crowed over the stupidity of their marks, whose paranoia stemmed not from caution but from an outsize sense of their importance.

Arise for the work of humankind. Be humble. However grand you are today or may become tomorrow, you too will be forgotten. There are no places for us in the crypt of Westminster Abbey. Even if there were, with the centuries, our accomplishments would be forgotten and our names become puzzles. But our moral sentiments can live on as memes that multiply through values in the service of others. A worthy past sedimented into a better future.

Despite the Bank of England gaining independence for setting UK monetary policy in 1998 and in the process being freed from political meddling; it has recently come under renewed attack from the lunatic fringe within the UK's Conservative Party, especially amongst arch Brexiteers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg (a.k.a. JackOff Grease-Smug to his growing number of detractors) who appear hell-bent on undermining the current bank governor's every move. When Mark Carney rightly sounds the alarm bells of the potential dangers to the UK economy resulting from a 'no deal' Brexit, he should be allowed to offer those wise words of warning without being subjected to Rees-Mogg's tiresome whining and monotonous droning on about politically motivated statements. It's high time this pestilent gnat modified his tune before a large fly swat of public outrage takes him down.

Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss. The language of hunting has a luminous word for such mark-making: 'foil'. A creature's 'foil' is its track. We easily forget that we are track-makers, though, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete - and these are substances not easily impressed. 'Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering,' writes Thomas Clark in his enduring prose-poem 'In Praise of Walking'. It's true that, once you begin to notice them, you see that the landscape is still webbed with paths and footways - shadowing the modern-day road network, or meeting it at a slant or perpendicular. Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets - say the name of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite - holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths.

Mark sighed to himself as he walked home. The afternoon was unexpectedly warm, the sky deep blue and cloudless. You figure her out, he told himself. You're the expert. Mark Carney, girl expert. Everyone should ask me for advice. I know everything about girls, except how to get along with them, how to get along without them, and how to understand them. And I can't even worry about Marcy right now because I've got a date with Janine.

In the past year, a new divestment campaign has caught on, faster than any other such campaign in history, according to a recent Oxford university study. Investors representing more than $2.5tn in assets under management, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Norway’s giant oil fund and the Church of England (whose archbishop is a former oil executive) have all joined the chorus saying sayonara to their dirtiest fossil fuel investments. They reason this is not about biting the hand that fed them; rather, it is about morality and economics. It is about the morality of not standing on the sidelines of climate change, “the most pressing moral issue in our world” in the words of the lead bishop on the environment for the Church of England. It is also about the economics of not getting stuck holding a bag of stranded fossil fuel assets that cannot be burnt if the world is to adhere to a given carbon budget, a topic on which Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has expressed concerns. And it is about not missing out on the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. The president of Harvard University, whose endowment is estimated to have a carbon footprint as big as that of Jamaica, is not convinced. As Drew Faust argues, constraining investment options risks significantly constraining investment returns, while divestment is unlikely to have a financial impact on the affected companies. It also raises the troubling problem of boycotting a whole class of companies whose products and services we rely on.

Mark Carney warned investors that “the catastrophic norms of the future can be seen in the tail risks of today.”10 To put that another way, while the physical risks from climate change will mostly occur decades in the future, asset prices are starting to reflect the increase in risk that comes from events with tail risks.

[Vaclav] Havel called this “living within a lie”. The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation. The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable. A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. But let's be clear eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.