Mark Carney

Mark Joseph Carney (born March 16, 1965) is a Canadian economist and banker who was the governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and the governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

Carney was born on March 16, 1965, in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, the son of Verlie Margaret (née Kemper) and Robert James Martin Carney.

When Carney was six, his family moved to Edmonton, Alberta.

Carney has three siblings — an older brother and sister, Seán and Brenda, and a younger brother Brian.

Carney attended St. Francis Xavier High School, Edmonton before studying at Harvard University.

Carney graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a bachelor's degree with high honours in economics, before postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford at St Peter's College and Nuffield College, where he received master's and doctoral degrees in the same field in 1993 and 1995, respectively.

The title of his DPhil thesis is The Dynamic Advantage of Competition.

Carney spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs and worked in their Boston, London, New York City, Tokyo, and Toronto offices.

His progressively more senior positions included: co-head of sovereign risk; executive director, emerging debt capital markets; and managing director, investment banking.

He worked on South Africa's post-apartheid venture into international bond markets, and was involved in Goldman's work with the 1998 Russian financial crisis.

In 2003, Carney left Goldman Sachs to join the Bank of Canada as a deputy governor.

One year later, he was recruited to join the Department of Finance Canada as senior associate deputy minister, beginning that role on November 15, 2004.

From November 2004 to October 2007, Carney was the senior associate deputy minister and G7 deputy in the Canadian Finance Department.

He served under two finance ministers: Ralph Goodale, a Liberal and Jim Flaherty, a Conservative.

During this time Carney oversaw the Government of Canada's controversial plan to tax income trusts at source.

Carney was also the lead on the federal government's profitable sale of its 19 percent stake in Petro-Canada.

In November 2007, it was announced that Carney would be appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada.

Carney took on this role at the beginning of the 2007 global financial crisis.

At the time of his appointment, Carney was the youngest central bank governor among the G8 and G20.

Carney's actions as Governor of the Bank of Canada are said to have played a major role in helping Canada avoid the worst impacts of the financial crisis.

He immediately left his position at the Department of Finance to serve as an advisor to the outgoing governor, David Dodge, before formally assuming Dodge's position on February 1, 2008.

Carney was selected over Paul Jenkins, the senior deputy governor, who had been considered the front-runner to succeed Dodge.

The epoch-making feature of his tenure as Governor remains the decision to cut the overnight rate by 50 basis points in March 2008, only one month after his appointment.

While the European Central Bank delivered a rate increase in July 2008, Carney anticipated the leveraged-loan crisis would trigger global contagion.

When policy rates in Canada hit the effective lower-bound, the central bank combatted the crisis with the non-standard monetary tool "conditional commitment" in April 2009 to hold the policy rate for at least one year, in a boost to domestic credit conditions and market confidence.

Output and employment began to recover from mid-2009, in part thanks to monetary stimulus.

The Canadian economy outperformed those of its G7 peers during the crisis, and Canada was the first G7 nation to have both its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employment recover to pre-crisis levels.

The Bank of Canada's decision to provide substantial additional liquidity to the Canadian financial system, and its unusual step of announcing a commitment to keep interest rates at their lowest possible level for one year, appear to have been significant contributors to Canada's weathering of the crisis.

Canada's risk-averse fiscal and regulatory environment is also cited as a factor.

In 2009 a Newsweek columnist wrote, "Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize."

Carney earned various accolades for his leadership during the financial crisis: he was named one of Financial Times's "Fifty who will frame the way forward", and of Time Magazine ' s 2010 Time 100.

He was the chair of the Financial Stability Board from 2011 to 2018.

Prior to his governorships, Carney worked at Goldman Sachs as well as the Department of Finance Canada.

He also serves as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.

In May 2011, Reader's Digest named him "Editor's Choice for Most Trusted Canadian".

On November 4, 2011, Carney was named Chairman of the Basel-based Financial Stability Board.

In a statement, Carney credited his appointment to "the strong reputation of Canada's financial system and the leading role that Canada has played in helping to develop many of the most important international reforms".

The three-year term was a part-time commitment, allowing Carney to complete his term at the Bank of Canada.

In October 2012, Carney was named "Central Bank Governor of the Year 2012" by the editors of Euromoney magazine.

He is chairman, and head of impact investing at Brookfield Asset Management since 2020, and was named chairman of Bloomberg Inc., parent company of Bloomberg L.P., in 2023.