Mark Carney, The Goldman Sachs Guy, par excellence!

On December 12, 2011, I left a comment on a newspaper website about Mark Carney as the Governor of the Bank of Canada.  In it, I wondered why a man who made big money at Goldman Sachs for thirteen years would bother to take a comparatively low paying job as Governor of the Bank of Canada and surmised that it wasn't about the money, it was about the power.  My comment was removed for being "abusive."

However, now that Carney is the chair of the FSB and will be the new Governor of the Bank of England, I feel vindicated.  He certainly wields more power now than when I first stated my opinion.  The comment was not meant to be abusive but realistic because I know too much about how Goldman Sachs works its black magic.

Mark Carney, as Governor of the Bank of Canada, presided over the bailout of Canadian Banks even though the Prime Minister denied any such bailout.

Here is an economist's view of Mark Carney's appointment as the Governor of the Bank of England:

The Bank of Canada Governor is Wrong on Too Big to Fail and Wrong on Canada's Banking System
By Marshall Auerback - New Economic Perspectives

As a Canadian, perhaps I should feel a surge of patriotic pride now that Mark Carney has been designated the new head of the Bank of England – quite a step up for the current governor of the Bank of Canada.  There is no question that Mr. Carney is a market-savvy guy (he did, after all, work for the vampire squid), and his experiences as Chairman on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) suggests that he is sensitive to the ongoing systemic risks present in our increasingly complex global banking system.

That said, his recent attack on the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane in a Euromoney interview last month,  does give one some cause for concern, particularly as it evinces the usual complacency that most Canadians seem to feel about the basic soundness of their own banking system, which essentially upholds the universal banking model as a viable one.  By contrast, in his famous “dog and frisbee speech” delivered last August at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Haldane suggested that: “Regulation of modern finance is almost certainly too complex. That configuration spells trouble… Because complexity generates uncertainty, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity.”

In contrast to Andy Haldane, Governor Carney  is comfortable with the “universal banking” model, so long as they have sufficient capital buffers and do not put taxpayers at risk.  Well, there’s a number of things to be said in response to that.  For one, even though Canada’s banks are large within the context of the Canadian economy, their asset size is still relatively paltry in relation to, say, JP Morgan/Chase.

Read the whole article here