Mark Carney: The Wrongest Man at the Wrongest Time Ever Mark Carney’s bid for Canadian leadership pits a climate-activist banker against a political and economic tide increasingly rejecting the very ideals he champions. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/18/mark-carney-the-wrongest-man-at-the-wrongest-time-ever/
The politicization of business and capital markets has many fathers. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, one of the most prominent and unrelenting advocates for “sustainability” in investing, is often described as such. Klaus Schwab, the now-retired chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum, also often wears that title. So does the billionaire political gadfly Michael Bloomberg; so does R. Edward Freeman, the business professor and originator of “stakeholder theory;” and so do countless others who have worked diligently to advance ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance investing), DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and all the other efforts to make business and investing more “socially responsible” or less unfair or…whatever.
Of all those responsible for this abuse of business and capital markets, perhaps no man is more singularly responsible—yet nearly totally overlooked by ESG’s critics—than Mark Carney. Carney is a banking and economic giant. He was the Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008-2013 and the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013-2020. It was in this latter capacity that, in September 2016, Carney gave one of the most important and influential speeches in the history of central banking. Appearing at an event in Berlin, Carney gave a very carefully and very confrontationally worded address, in which he addressed climate change and framed its mitigation in fiscal and fiduciary terms. “A wholesale reassessment of prospects, as climate-related risks are re-evaluated,” Carney intoned, “could destabilise markets, spark a pro-cyclical crystallisation of losses and lead to a persistent tightening of financial conditions: a climate Minsky moment.”
A “Minsky moment” is a market term named for the economist Hyman Minsky, which is used to identify the point at which a bull market has become so speculative and over-leveraged that it hits a peak and then tips over and crashes. What Carney meant by predicting a “climate-related” Minsky moment was that he—and others, presumably—believed that global capital markets were already overleveraged, already well overbought, given the inevitability of climate change. As a result, once investors started to understand the reality of the climate “crisis,” they would come to realize how foolish and speculative their investments in “unsustainable” businesses were, leading to a crash. Or to put it more simply, Carney—the Governor of the Bank of England—was warning global investors and politicians that they either had to force business in general to become environmentally sustainable immediately or could face commercial and economic Armageddon.
It is nigh on impossible to describe just how destructive Carney’s speech and subsequent activism were. Not only did he make the case that climate change posed a real and imminent threat to global economic well-being, but he also provided ESG practitioners and advocates with the means to try to legitimize their social and political meddling. After all, here was a guy who had run two of the most important central banks in the world saying that “climate risk is investment risk,” thereby giving cover to those who wanted to use their economic might to affect political change but felt constrained by their ethical obligations to their investors and clients. Or, as I put in my book, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, Carney’s speech was “a watershed in global finance, the moment that the big banks, the monster investment firms, and the world’s central banks began framing climate change as a risk management issue rather than good corporate social policy.” From that point on, the Larry Finks and Michael Bloombergs of the world could claim the moral high ground and could insist—contrary to the evidence—that what they were doing was legitimately in their clients’ interests and not in the service of their own political predilections.
Carney went on to become one of “the usual suspects” in Western political activism, using any and every crisis to advance his ideological projects. He vehemently opposed Brexit and, indeed, eventually resigned his post at the Bank of England because the British people had the gall to defy him on that matter. He advised both the British and Canadian governments on COVID policy and, like many of his fellow “sustainability” advocates, used the pandemic to push more aggressively for a “new” form of capitalism, a new economic model that would be fairer, friendlier, and encompass “human values.” In 2020, after leaving the BofE, Carney became the United Nations envoy for climate action finance, which means that he ran around the world saying things like, “When you look at climate change from a human mortality perspective, it will be the equivalent of a coronavirus crisis every year from the middle of this century, and every year, not just a one-off event.”
In 2022, Carney, along with his friend Michael Bloomberg, helped create GFANZ—the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero—an outgrowth of the UN’s COP26 meeting on climate change and one of the most powerful advocacy organizations pressing governments and businesses to abandon fossil fuels. The next year, Bloomberg appointed Carney chairman of the board of directors of Bloomberg L.P. In 2024, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formalized Carney’s advisory role with his government, naming him a special advisor and chairman of the task force on economic growth (something of which Canada has had very little for several years).
And now he wants to be the prime minister of Canada.
This past Thursday, Mark Carney announced that he is running to replace Trudeau as the leader of the Liberal Party, the prelude to running for Prime Minister. Despite never having held political office before, he is certain he’s up to the challenge of running Canada whilst Donald Trump runs the United States. And he’s serious…which is kinda sad.
Try as I might, I cannot think of anyone—save Justin Trudeau himself—whose politics and policies are less compatible with the zeitgeist in the West at the moment than Mark Carney. Throughout Western Europe, people are fed up with leaders who favor open borders, social justice politics, and the economics of decline (as dictated by Net Zero energy policies). Carney practically embodies all of the above. He is, in so many ways, the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. And yet…
One of two things will happen in eight weeks when the Liberal Party chooses its leader. Either Carney’s candidacy will fall flat, proving that he is too out of touch even for leftist Canadians, or it will succeed, proving that leftist Canadians desperately want to corroborate Mencken’s supposition that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” If it’s the former, then perhaps Canada can resuscitate its near-depression-level economy and become a global energy leader again. If the latter, then…well…maybe President Trump has the right idea.
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