This article appears in the October 18, 2019 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Mark Carney: The Prince (Charles) of Central Bankers
[Print version of this article]
Oct. 12—Bank of England chief Mark Carney is the most influential central banker in the world; he has held the most senior positions in global central banking in the shortest period of time; and is probably more responsible than any other figure (except possibly his billionaire partner Michael Bloomberg) for the current rampage of environmentalist assaults on modern industrial society.
As would be expected of a senior servant of the British Crown risen from an Irish-Canadian background, educated at Harvard and Oxford, Carney is also the most arrogant of central bankers, publicly attacking prime ministers, leaders of political campaigns, and other senior Bank of England executives at will. Paraphrasing the title of the book which exposed Enron, he has been anointed “the smartest guy in the room” by the City of London imperial financial center, and he believes it.
Since his speech at the November-December 2015 UN COP21 conference (cradle of “The Paris Accord” on climate change, from which President Donald Trump withdrew the United States), Mark Carney has imposed an anti-industrial direction on the policy of most major central banks in the world, even as their power relative to governments has grown.
Working throughout with Michael Bloomberg’s “Beyond Carbon” war against President Trump and coal, Carney has made investment in fossil fuel-based technologies something that must be “disclosed” by companies to banks and funds, tagged as a high “climate risk” by those banks and funds, and be prevented. As he told the London Guardian in an April 27 article, “If some companies and industries fail to adapt to this new [anti-carbon] world, they will fail to exist.”
So enamored of his own phrase, he repeated it in his UN “Climate Action Summit” speech Sept. 23: “Firms that align their business models to the transition to a net zero [carbon] world will be rewarded handsomely. Those that fail to adapt will cease to exist.” At what the law firm Latham and Watkins called an “insurance industry event,” on Sept. 22, the firm’s website reports that “Mr. Carney believes that firms that embrace this change will thrive, whereas firms who fail to adapt at the necessary pace will struggle, or even cease to exist.” The insurance conference was titled, “Insurance, Risk Financing and Development: Driving Public-Private Action for Climate Resilience” and was hosted by the United Nations Development Programme, the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Insurance Development Forum, and InsuResilience Global Partnership.
Carney told the Climate Action Summit that all investment, at least all energy-related investment, will have to become green to be permitted—one of “50 shades of green,” as he put it.
We Are ‘Climate Risk’
Thus Carney, the UK’s central banker, is giving orders on energy technology to companies and governments all over the world, through other central bankers who follow him and through private banks. If they follow those orders—and Carney said this week at a Tokyo conference they will become mandatory “climate risk disclosures” by 2021—the sources of 60% of the world’s energy and power (85% in Africa) will be progressively shut down and replaced by far less powerful, less reliable “renewables”—wind and solar. Electricity use per capita will fall in developing countries, and, as EIR has shown, without adequate electricity, tens of millions of people live shorter lives, and tens of millions of children die in childhood.
Confronted on this “eco-fascism” at the UN by LaRouche Political Action Committee backed candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey, Daniel Burke, Carney denied it and hurried away.
The Bank of England head expects to give orders—technological, political, financial—in the UK and worldwide. And he presents the effects of those orders as if they were the effects of “climate change.”
So far out on the “climate emergency” limb has Carney gone, and presumed to use his power to “direct investments appropriately,” that Politico on Oct. 24, 2018 published a serious article about him entitled “Mark Carney, Eco-Warrior.”
Yet, Carney himself shows in his speeches no knowledge of climate science and does not discuss it. Instead, he makes ritual references to “extreme weather disasters,” which people have blabbed about for centuries, knowing they can be costly to insurance companies, without demanding that banks and investment funds stop them. And he presents the effects of his orders, as if they were the “reality of climate change” which all banks and companies must face up to.
Beginning at COP21 in late 2015, Carney drew 24 other central banks and European private megabanks into a “Task-Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure” (TCFD), headed by Bloomberg. The Politico article illustrated how the statements by Carney about the TCFD—to the effect that companies would have to disclose climate-related risk—became a corporate risk, including in court.
In October 2018 his Bank of England issued regulatory guidance to banks and insurers that they must maintain sufficient capital to cover “climate risks,” and must figure out what that level of capital is, thus making a bank capital requirement out of a fraud. Moreover, companies are now being sued for not “disclosing” (or making up) climate-related financial risk in their financial reports to shareholders; which they must do because of Carney’s TCFD.
The British environmental action lawyers’ group ClientEarth, among others, is using that strategy. And an executive of the Christian Aid charity told Politico, “Carney is the best champion and messenger we have on that issue because he is actually in the driving seat”—not because he knows anything about climate science. A portfolio manager at Union Investment in Frankfurt added, “The TCFD increases the risk profile of companies with a high CO2 footprint. As investors, we have to think what this (TCFD) means for our investments.”
In another example of Carney’s “we are climate risk” thinking, he has claimed that plunging sales of diesel cars in Europe represent climate-related financial risk of automakers. The plunge in sales has actually been created by government bans on driving diesels, strongly opposed by the public.
Genius Not Born, But Appointed
In Mark Carney’s hometown of Ft. Smith, at the southern boundary of Canada’s Northwest Territories at 60 degrees north latitude, it has been colder in 2019 than in any of the past ten years, with a great deal more snow and rain. Its hottest recorded day (103° Fahrenheit) was not a result of any recent global warming; rather, it was in July of 1941. Ft. Smith’s forecast for the second half of October calls for average daily high temperatures at the freezing mark, 32° Fahrenheit. It is sometimes claimed Carney appreciates the environment in part because of Ft. Smith’s natural surroundings, but he is long gone from there.
Mark Carney began his banking career with 13 years at Goldman Sachs (1990-2003) in London and Tokyo, after Harvard and graduate degrees from St. Peters and Nuffield Colleges at Oxford. The latter is closely connected to the UK government and its economics and finance departments. Carney attends the conferences of the Bilderberg Society along with the Bilderberg enthusiast, British Finance Minister George Osborne, who appointed him Bank of England Governor.
At Goldman, Carney was a trader and advisor, eventually managing director of investment banking. He was in Goldman’s London office in 1997-98, at a time when that bank was giving “two-faced” advice on Russian bonds to clients, in the manner brutally exposed for 2007-08 by Sen. Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations; i.e., Goldman was promoting to its clients the Russian government’s short-term bonds which blew out in the “GKO Crisis” of 1998, while selling and avoiding them itself.
From 2004-08 Carney, in an unusual combination, was both Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, and Deputy Finance Minister of Canada. In February 2008, Carney, at 41, was appointed Bank of Canada Governor, chosen over a 35-year veteran of the Bank who was considered most likely to get the job. As Bank of Canada head in the financial crisis building up during 2008, Carney immediately made a half-point rate cut and was the first central banker in the G20 with zero interest rates, and in April 2009 publicly committed the Bank to hold rates at the “zero lower bound” for at least a year. The Bank made very large liquidity loans to banks at the same time. All these policies were later copied by other western central banks—though not in China, India or Russia.
The Canadian banks did not undergo a “TARP” capital investment and did not fail; the Canadian economy was the first to recover real GDP and employment to 2008 levels (by 2013); and Carney was lavishly praised in the international media and named Central Bank Governor of the Year in 2012 by Euromoney magazine. But, Canada’s “recovery” then stalled out completely. Real GDP fell for two years, 2013-14, and in 2018 it stood just 5% higher than a decade earlier in 2008—meaning it has been in the “European” category of general economic stagnation.
Carney, therefore, was the pioneer of the “zero-interest-rate policy” (ZIRP) central bank regime. At the 2019 Economic Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he emphatically admitted this policy had failed, and was failing to create growth or inflation. At that Jackson Hole bankers meeting, this British banker was arrogant and crazy enough to propose replacing the U.S. dollar with a global, digital currency, like the Libra proposed by Facebook but run by central bankers, so as to cure the failures of ZIRP and NIRP (negative-interest-rate policy).
Before his ZIRP could fail in Canada and elsewhere, however, he had been appointed (in 2011) to the additional office of Chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) created by the G20 in the wake of the crisis, and already in 2010 Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on the Global Financial System; and in 2012 head of the Bank of England. In implementation of the UN Paris Climate Accord, he led the creation in 2015 of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), which is a body of the FSB, and which now includes 24 central banks and European megabanks (with Wall Street backers JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock LLP).
The central banks of the FSB, headed by Carney, appointed 30 people to form the TCFD, including green billionaire Michael Bloomberg as its chair. This is how some former central bankers, now executives at BlackRock LLP, became leaders of TCFD and began the work of “taxonomies,” or classification of companies according to their “climate risk level.” TCFD also included executives from Barclays Bank; HSBC, the City of London; Swiss Re; and Al Gore’s partner David Blood. The stated purpose of this Task Force was “to provide information and to advise investors, lenders and insurers about climate-related risks.”
Carney and Bloomberg were here already starting a power-grab by central banks. Their mandate does not include advising investors, or any others, about climate. Suppose they had said “political risks” or “terror threats” or “the risk of war”—central banks do not advise or regulate on such matters, until Carney decided they did. From the TCFD came the Green Finance Initiative to generate and support “green bonds.” So now the central banks were also advising on technologies in which to invest or not invest.
In 2012 Carney became a coordinator of the Davos World Economic Forum. In 2012 Osborne appointed him the first non-Briton Bank of England Governor in its history—raising the Governor’s salary to lure Carney from Canada—so that in effect Carney held four key global central bank positions at the same time. He served two three-year terms as FSB Chair and then was extended for another year, so he is only now in the process of being replaced by Randall Quarles of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Carney’s term at the head of the BoE has also been extended a year, into 2020.
Brexit and Glass-Steagall
Again, in becoming Bank of England Governor, as when he was appointed to head the Bank of Canada, Carney was chosen (by fellow Bilderberger Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer) over a veteran executive of the Bank, Andrew Haldane, who was then Executive Director for Financial Stability. As he came in, Carney fought publicly with Haldane over bank capital requirements and over bank separation. Haldane had publicly written in favor of a version of the Glass-Steagall Act, which came very close, in 2012, to passing the House of Lords; and he had called for 10% required bank capital ratios. Carney pronounced that Haldane “lacks a proper understanding of the facts” of regulation of banks.
Then in 2016, Carney was repeatedly interviewed on the BBC attacking Brexit during the referendum campaign and warning it would harm the British economy. He claimed that it was “his duty to speak up” against Brexit although it was definitely not his job or his duty. He repeatedly and explicitly stated that a vote to leave the EU would cause a recession in the UK. This effectively made him a “Remain” campaigner, and the forecast was wrong. According to him, as reported in the London Spectator Oct. 22, 2016, it proved wrong because of the rate cut which he made, back to ZIRP, right after Brexit passed.
Carney also publicly attacked British Prime Minister Theresa May when she suggested his years-long “super low” interest rates had helped people with assets, while “People without them suffered. . . . People with savings have found themselves poorer.” Carney’s response: “The policies are done by technocrats. We are not going to take instruction on our policies from the political side.” He would give political direction, not take it.
The Eco-Warrior’s Guides
As noted, Mark Carney doesn’t speak coherently or appear to have much knowledge, goal-seeking or otherwise, about climate science or climate change. His “50 shades of green” comment shows he tends to regard it all as a certain kind of movie. But he has guides, who may know no more, but do consider themselves experts, who tell him about this “reality” he constantly invokes. The speech that he gave just before the Paris Climate Accord, on Sept. 29, 2015 at Lloyds Bank in London, had the weird title, “Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon—Climate Change and Financial Stability.”
Three years later he used that phrase to praise Prince Charles in a speech at St. James Palace in November 2018: “His Royal Highness has provided inspirational leadership on these critical issues for decades. Indeed, if we had heeded his advice when it was first offered, we might have already solved the Tragedy of the Horizon” (reported in the Daily Mail Nov. 21, 2018). This speech was advertised on the Bank of England site as the “Accounting for Sustainability Forum,” but it was actually for Prince Charles’ 70th birthday. The London Telegraph reported that as soon as late 2013 the new Bank of England Governor—frankly called by the paper “the most powerful man in the financial world”—was called to Clarendon House by the Prince to be told “his concerns.” This was the first of a series of meetings.
The Telegraph added, “It’s a shame that the Canadian’s wife, Diana, did not accompany him. She shares the Prince’s environmental concerns.” And here may be the other source of Mark Carney’s “eco-war.”
Diana Fox Carney is a British economist and “climate-change” activist. She is on the Board of Ambassadors and the Board of Directors of WWF-UK (WWF is the current moniker of the World Wildlife Fund launched decades ago by Thomas Huxley, Prince Philip and Nazi SS member Prince Bernhard). She also serves on the boards of the Shell Foundation, the “sustainable energy foundation” called Ashden, Friends of the Royal Academy, etc. She is executive director of the investment bank, Pi Capital Partners.
Immediately before COP21 and the Paris Accord, and before her husband’s speech there, Diana Fox Carney co-authored a report in November 2015 on the same subject—“financial climate risk”—published by the London Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Her co-author was one Joss Garman, of Greenpeace UK, European Climate Foundation-UK, and The Syria Campaign—formed to support the White Helmets. The report was titled “Known Unknowns: The Hidden Threats that Climate Risks Pose to British Prosperity.” This report was updated after COP21, in a “2nd Edition” published March 2016 by IPPR.
Section 3 of the report, Conclusions and Recommendations, states its authors’—and the TCFD’s—objective exactly:
Ensure financial decision-makers have the information they need in order to account for climate risks; ensure asset managers do not ignore these risks in their decision-making; to reduce the overall level of the risk that most businesses face as a consequence of climate change.
The fact that nearly every one of the 20-plus sections of this report is on some aspect of “the economic risks of climate change,” suggests that Diana Fox Carney was, in fact, initiating the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure along with her husband. Politico’s “Mark Carney: Eco-Warrior” quoted one person who has known Carney for a decade saying, “His wife’s powerful influence has shaped Carney’s thinking on the matter.”