Mark Carney
Mark Carney ran two central banks before becoming Prime Minister of Canada in March 2025, without ever having held elected office. Born in 1965 in Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories and raised in Edmonton, he played goalie for the Harvard hockey team, took a degree in economics there and a doctorate at Oxford, and spent thirteen years at Goldman Sachs in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. He joined the Bank of Canada and then the finance department, and was made Governor in 2008 at forty-two. He cut rates to their floor early in the financial crisis and, unusually, committed publicly to holding them there for a fixed period — an explicit use of forward guidance that is now standard practice. Canada's banks required no bailout, which owed as much to earlier regulation as to him, and his reputation was made. He was appointed Governor of the Bank of England in 2013, the first non-citizen ever to hold the post in its three-hundred-year history, and served through the Brexit referendum, when he cut rates and announced liquidity measures within hours of the result, and through the first months of the pandemic. He was criticised throughout by Brexit supporters for the Bank's forecasts. He then worked on climate finance as a UN special envoy, building the Glasgow alliance of financial institutions committed to net zero. He won the Liberal leadership in March 2025 with 85.9 per cent and a general election six weeks later, on a campaign dominated by the trade conflict with the United States. He is the only person to have led the central banks of two G7 countries, and the second Canadian prime minister to take office without a seat in the Commons.
- Lived: 1965 CE – ?
- Nationality: Canadian
- Roles: Prime Minister of Canada (2025-present)
