Mark Carney facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Mark Carney
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Carney in 2015
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| Prime Minister-designate of Canada | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Assuming office TBD |
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| Monarch | Charles III | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Governor-General | Mary Simon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Succeeding | Justin Trudeau | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Leader of the Liberal Party | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Assumed office March 9, 2025 |
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| Preceded by | Justin Trudeau | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Personal details | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Born | March 16, 1965 Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, Canada |
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| Political party | Liberal | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Spouse |
Diana Fox
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| Children | 4 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Mark Joseph Carney (born March 16, 1965) is a Canadian economist and politician who has been the prime minister-designate of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party since March 9, 2025. As the leader of the governing party, Carney is expected to succeed Justin Trudeau as the next prime minister of Canada. He previously served as the eighth governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and the 120th governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.
Carney was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University in 1988, going on to study at the University of Oxford, where he earned a master's degree in 1993 and a doctorate in 1995. He held various roles at Goldman Sachs before joining the Bank of Canada as a deputy governor in 2003. In 2004, he was named as senior associate deputy minister for the Department of Finance Canada. In 2007, Carney was named Governor of the Bank of Canada, where he was responsible for Canadian monetary policy during the global financial crisis. He led the Canadian central bank until 2013, when he was appointed as Governor of the Bank of England, where he led the British central bank's response to Brexit and the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After leaving central banking, Carney served as chair and head of impact investing at Brookfield Asset Management and as chair of the board of directors for Bloomberg L.P. He was also appointed the United Nations Special Envoy for climate action and finance. Carney also worked as an adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the COVID-19 pandemic and was made chair of the Liberal Party's economic growth taskforce. In early 2025, he announced his intention to seek the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, winning a landslide victory in March.
Contents
Early life and education
Carney was born on March 16, 1965, in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories; he is the son of Verlie Margaret (née Kemper), a stay-at-home mother, and Robert James Martin Carney, a high school principal. His paternal grandparents were Irish, from County Mayo. When Carney was six, his family moved to Edmonton, Alberta. His father was the Liberal candidate for Edmonton South in the 1980 Canadian federal election, placing second. His mother returned to university to pursue a career in education when Carney was ten.
Carney has three siblings — an older brother and sister, Seán and Brenda, and a younger brother Brian. Carney attended St. Francis Xavier High School, before studying at Harvard University on a partial scholarship and financial aid.
Carney graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a bachelor's degree with high honours in economics; he took 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. During his Harvard years, he was backup goalie for the varsity ice hockey team and was a roommate of future NHL general manger Peter Chiarelli and former ice hockey player Mark Benning. Carney was also co-captain of the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club alongside David Lametti.
Financial career
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 for emerging debt capital markets, and managing director for 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 Department of Finance Canada. 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.
Governor of the Bank of Canada (2008–2013)
In October 2007, Carney was appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada. He immediately left his position at the Department of Finance to become 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.
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.
Financial crisis
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.
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. In May 2011, Reader's Digest named him "Editor's Choice for Most Trusted Canadian".
In October 2012, Carney was named "Central Bank Governor of the Year 2012" by the editors of Euromoney magazine.
International organization memberships
Carney was chairman of the Bank for International Settlements' Committee on the Global Financial System from July 2010 until January 2012.
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Carney is a member of the Group of Thirty, an international body of leading financiers and academics, and of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum. Carney attended the annual meetings of the Bilderberg Group in 2011, 2012 and 2019.
On November 4, 2011, Carney was named chairman of the Basel-based Financial Stability Board, which coordinates international financial regulatory authorities. 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. While there had been no indication of his priorities as chairman, on the day of his appointment the Board published a list of 29 banks that were considered sufficiently large as to pose a risk to the global economy should they fail. At his first press conference as Chairman of the FSB in January 2012, Carney laid out his key priorities for the board. Carney's term would end in 2018, while he was in his next post at the Bank of England.
Governor of the Bank of England (2013–2020)
On November 26, 2012, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced the appointment of Carney as Governor of the Bank of England. He succeeded Sir Mervyn King on July 1, 2013. He was the first non-Briton to be appointed to the role since the Bank of England was established in 1694. The Bank of England was given additional powers from 2013, such as the ability to set bank capital requirements.
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Prior to taking up the post, Carney had already indicated disagreement with the Bank of England's Executive Director of Financial Stability Andy Haldane, specifically on leverage ratios and on bank break-ups. He has been quoted as saying that Haldane does not have a "proper understanding of the facts" on bank regulation. He was thought to have been offered a total pay package of about £624,000 ($844,000 USD) per year, approximately £100,000 ($135,000 USD) more per year than his predecessor.
Shortly before Carney took up the post, the Bank of England took up the financial regulation duties after Financial Services Authority. Carney's changes to the Bank's operating procedures helped modernize the institution such as making much more media appearances than predecessors, including controversial announcements during two referendums. Carney implemented a policy called "forward guidance" in which the Bank would not raise interest rates if unemployment was above 7% to try and encourage business lending.
In 2014, Carney warned that if the Scottish independence referendum was successful, the new country would likely not be able to continue using the pound sterling without ceding some powers to the UK.
In 2015, Carney changed the number of yearly interest rate meetings from 12 to eight and ordered minutes to be published during the announcements.
Before the 2016 Brexit referendum, Carney warned that leaving the European Union could cause a recession. After the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron, shortly after the result supporting a departure, he made another public announcement that the financial system would operate normally to assuage public concerns. Afterwards, the Bank cut interest rates in half from 0.5% to 0.25% and restarted quantitative easing. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, as Carney was set to leave the governorship in March 2020, the Bank cut interest rates by 0.5% to protect against the pandemic's expected economic shocks.
Post-governorships (2020–2024)
On October 2020, Carney was vice chairman at Brookfield Asset Management, where he led the firm's environmental, social and governance (ESG) and impact fund investment strategy. In February 2021, Carney retracted an earlier claim that the $600 billion Brookfield Asset Management portfolio was carbon neutral. He had based his claim on the fact that Brookfield has a large renewable energy portfolio and "all the avoided emissions that come with that". The claim was criticized as accounting tricks because avoided emissions do not counteract the emissions from investments in coal and other fossil fuels responsible for Brookfield's carbon footprint of about 5,200 metric tons of carbon dioxide. A week after being appointed as special advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it was revealed that Brookfield Asset Management solicited the federal government for $10 billion in federal funds as part of $50 billion Canada-only asset fund. Carney did not need to follow standard ethical disclosures mandatory for prime ministerial advisors because he was employed by the Liberal Party rather than the Prime Minister's Office.
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In 2020, Carney launched the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets—an initiative to increase trading of voluntary carbon offsets— with Bill Winters as Group Chief Executive. The TSVCM is sponsored by the Institute of International Finance. Taskforce members include more than "40 leaders from six continents with backgrounds across the carbon market value chain", including representatives from the Bank of America, BlackRock, Bloomberg's New Energy Finance, BNP Paribas, BP, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Tata Steel, Total, IHS Markit, and LSE. In a December 3, 2020 Financial Times article, Carney said that the voluntary global carbon offset market was an "imperative" to help reduce emissions. The Times article cited Carney saying London would likely be the host of the "new pilot market for voluntary carbon offsets" which could be "set up" by December 2021.
In February 2021, Carney joined the board of fintech company Stripe. Carney helped launch the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. He acts as the group's Co-Chair. Since 2022, Carney has also been an advisor to Watershed, a climate tech company founded by Stripe alumni that proposes to be "the platform companies need to succeed in the climate economy". In August 2023, Carney was named by Michael Bloomberg as chair of the new board of directors for Bloomberg L.P. as part of a broader reshuffle of the company's leadership. Carney became a special adviser and the chair of the Liberal task force on economic growth in September 2024.
Political beginnings
According to Carney, in 2012, Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked Carney—who was then governor of the Bank of Canada—if he would join the Conservative government as minister of finance. Carney declined, stating in a February 2025 interview with the CBC that he felt it "wasn't appropriate" for him to proceed with the offer because he felt it was not right to "go directly from being governor into elective politics."
In the 2013 Liberal Party of Canada leadership election, there was speculation that Carney would run. He ultimately declined to do so.
As he prepared to step down as governor of the Bank of England, Carney was appointed as United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance in March 2020. In January 2020, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed Carney to the position of finance advisor for the UK presidency of the COP26 United Nations Climate Change conference in Glasgow. At that time the conference was scheduled for November 2020, but it was later postponed to November 2021. Carney also served as an informal advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2020, advising him on the government's COVID-19 economic response.
Carney endorsed Catherine McKenney's candidacy for mayor of Ottawa in the 2022 mayoral election.
In October 2023, he endorsed the UK Labour Party's Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves to be the next chancellor of the exchequer in a video following Reeves' speech at the Labour Party conference that year. Following Labour winning the 2024 election, Carney was part of a taskforce which saw the creation of a British National Wealth Fund.
On September 9, 2024, Carney was named by Justin Trudeau to chair the Liberal Party of Canada's leader's Task Force on Economic Growth. His name was briefly mentioned upon the resignation of Chrystia Freeland as a possible candidate for finance minister in Trudeau's ministry.
Leader of the Liberal Party
2025 leadership campaign
On January 16, 2025, Carney officially announced that he was running in the 2025 Liberal Party of Canada leadership election. Carney also announced that he stepped down from all executive, board and advisory positions that he was part of in order to focus on his leadership campaign. By February 9, his campaign had raised more than $1.9 million in donations from over 11,000 people and received endorsements from 66 Liberal caucus members. Carney won on the first ballot with over 85.9% of the vote, making him the leader of the Liberal Party. His margin of victory surpassed Justin Trudeau's 2013 margin, winning all 343 electoral districts.
Prime Minister-designate of Canada (2025–present)
Swearing-in
Carney will be sworn-in as the 24th prime minister of Canada following the resignation of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. He will appoint the 30th Canadian Ministry the same day. Upon taking the oath of office, he will become the first Canadian prime minister to have never served in prior elected office. After becoming leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on March 9, 2025, it was reported that Carney will likely take office "in the next few days."
Views
During the 2023 Global Progress Action Summit, Carney advocated for progressives to build "health care, infrastructure, schools, opportunity, sustainability and prosperity." Carney was noted for using “masters of our own house” or in French "Maîtres Chez Nous", a phrase associated with the Quiet Revolution.
Economics
Wealth inequality
In 2011, Carney referred to the Occupy Wall Street protests as "entirely constructive", citing frustrations being felt "particularly in the United States" over inequality and increasing CEO-worker pay gaps. In December 2016, Carney warned of the societal risk of "staggering wealth inequalities" in a Roscoe Lecture at Liverpool John Moores University: "The proportion of the wealth held by the richest 1% of Americans increased from 25% in 1990 to 40% in 2012 ... Globally, the share of wealth held by the richest 1% in the world rose from one-third in 2000 to one-half in 2010".
Monetary policy
On August 23, 2019, Carney delivered a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's 2019 annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium entitled "The Growing Challenges for Monetary Policy in the current International Monetary and Financial System". Carney said that the "widespread use of the US dollar"—the dominant currency pricing—"in trade invoicing, in place of the currency of either the producer or the importer", has had a "destablilizing" effect on the global economy, according to Reuters. About 50 percent of international trade relies on the US dollar as the "currency of choice". This represents "five times greater than the US's share in world goods imports, and three times its share in world exports". Dominant currency pricing is not problematic when there is "synchronized growth" globally, Carney said. When "the tide is rising in America while receding elsewhere", the system needs to be revamped. Carney cited an article by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau on the potential role of digital currency area (DCA) in redefining the international monetary system.
Speaking just hours after US President Donald Trump posted a tweet blaming Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's policies for creating fears of an economic recession and threatening China with more retaliatory tariffs, Carney urged central banks to collaborate in replacing the US dollar as reserve currency. He cautioned against choosing another new hegemonic reserve currency like the Renminbi and suggested instead, a "new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency" (SHC), such as Libra, which could potentially be provided "through a network of central bank digital currencies," that would decrease the US dollar's "domineering influence" on trade worldwide.
Moral to market sentiments
On December 2, 2020, Carney delivered the first of four Reith Lectures—the BBC's flagship annual series. In "How We Get What We Value – From Moral to Market Sentiments", he said society had come to esteem financial value over human value and moved from market economies to market societies. The series covers a trio of crises: credit, Covid and climate.
Fiscal Policy
Carney also proposed scrapping the capital gains tax increase if elected Liberal leader and appointed prime minister, run a fiscal deficit, and balance the federal government's operational spending.
Foreign Policy
Brexit
Carney warned many times that Brexit was expected to negatively influence the UK economy. Consequently, Brexit activists accused him of making statements favouring the UK's continued membership of the European Union (EU) before the British EU-membership referendum. He replied that he felt it was his duty to speak up on such issues.
In September 2018, Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer, confirmed speculation that Carney would remain as Governor until January 2020, in order to ensure a "smooth" transition after the UK was set to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, a departure deadline that was missed.
In November 2018, Carney warned that large parts of the British economy were not ready for a no-deal Brexit. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today program, Carney explained that fewer than half of businesses had initiated contingency plans.
In February 2019, speaking about the global economy, Carney provided a less negative perspective on Brexit, stating that globalization has resulted in "imbalances of democracy and sovereignty", and that Brexit "is the first test of a new global order and could prove the acid test of whether a way can be found to broaden the benefits of openness while enhancing democratic accountability".
Carney also said that the increase in the perception that a no-deal Brexit is likely is "evidenced by betting odds and financial market asset pricing", resulting in the UK now having "the highest FX (foreign exchange) implied volatility, the highest equity risk premium and lowest real yields of any advanced economy."
NATO
In 2025, Carney promised to spend 2% of Canada's GDP on defence (the NATO target) by the end of 2030.
Environmentalism
Climate change
Carney has often advocated for environmental sustainability. He was appointed as a United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Change in 2019. In March 2021, Carney stated that in Canada there is a "huge economic opportunity" in the transition to a sustainable economy with reduced carbon emissions. He says that it is time to listen to scientists that have long been warning about the risks posed by climate change.
In a January 2025 interview with Jon Stewart, Carney attributed much of Canada's emissions to the oil industry, which he argued must become cleaner rather than ordinary Canadians changing their lifestyles. During his Liberal leadership campaign, Carney proposed replacing the existing consumer carbon tax with an incentive program to reward green choices, while keeping tax on large industrial emitters. He also promised to introduce a "carbon border-adjustment" to penalize high-polluting foreign imports.
Housing
In an March 2024 op-ed to the Globe and Mail, Carney advocating for a low-carbon housing policy that build support densification instead of sprawl. He argued that it should be easier for a homebuilder to densify by eliminating unit maximums, abolishing parking minimums and allowing taller buildings and more density near transit lines.
Publications
The title of Carney's DPhil thesis is The Dynamic Advantage of Competition.
Carney published the book Value(s) Building a Better World for All in 2021. It was positively reviewed by John Ivison for the National Post and by Will Hutton for The Guardian. On May 13th, 2025, Carney plans on publishing the book The Hinge: Time to Build an Even Better Canada.
Personal life
Carney met his wife, Diana Fox Carney, a British economist specializing in developing nations, while studying at the University of Oxford. She is active in various environmental and social justice causes. The couple married in July 1994 while he was finishing his doctoral thesis. They have four children and lived in Toronto before moving to the Rockcliffe Park neighbourhood of Ottawa and then moving to London in 2013. They moved back to Ottawa when Carney left his role at the Bank of England in 2020. He is the godfather of Chrystia Freeland's son; Freeland ran against him in the 2025 Liberal Party leadership election.
Carney speaks French. Carney is an Irish and British citizen in addition to holding Canadian citizenship. In 2025, Carney revealed that he is in the process of revoking his Irish and British citizenship. Carney has distant relatives in Liverpool and is a supporter of the city's Everton F.C. He is also a supporter of the Edmonton Oilers and the Edmonton Elks. Carney completed the 2015 London Marathon in 03:45:22, which was 17 minutes faster than his time at the 2011 Ottawa Marathon.
Carney is a practicing Catholic. In 2015, he was named as the most influential Catholic in Britain by The Tablet.
Honours and distinctions
- Officer of the Order of Canada (OC)
- Freeman of the City of London
- Honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D) from the University of Manitoba on April 5, 2013.
- Honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D) from the University of Alberta in Spring 2016.
- Honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D) from the University of Toronto on June 18, 2018.
- Honorary degree from the London Business School on July 16, 2019.
See also
In Spanish: Mark Carney para niños
