Mark Carney’s book, “Values” gives a somewhat detailed look into his view of the world and the policies he intends to implement if he is re-elected.
What he sees as the problems, what he is trying to achieve and the tools he means to use are all laid out in broad strokes. But given his background as a finance executive and his friends who are financiers, can he really be counted on to deliver for the average person?
Carney speaks in terms of human values but ultimately employs market mechanisms to deliver the major changes he feels are necessary.
Values: Building a Better World for All Paperback – Nov. 8 2022
by Mark Carney
“A bold and urgent argument by the Prime Minister of Canada and former bank governor on the radical, foundational change that is required if we are to build an economy and society based not on market values but on human values.”
He also refers a number of times to a classic book on finance:
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff
In this well-known work, Reinhart and Rogoff examine financial collapses across 5 continents over 800 years. “Reinhart and Rogoff provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations.”
In fact, the pattern of failure they detail is so repetitive and predictable that “This Time is Different” reads like a dark satire.
Can Carney’s policies break the pattern or are they doomed to follow into the well-worn rut of failure and simply be referred to as “This time is different”. Again. Clearly Carney believes he can finally set the world finance system on a positive and stable path.
“Values” - Overview of Hits and Misses
Mark Carney’s impressive academic and working career has been spent entirely in the world of finance. He recognizes the power it wields and he believes if the power of market forces can be fully applied virtually any problem can be overcome. This may imply to some he holds the view humans can control their destiny and break any natural bounds but clearly Carney recognizes certain limits like climate.
Just as clearly, Carney rejects the notion that might makes right and lists the misguided priorities, malfeasance (“the malignant culture at the heart of finance”) and shortcomings financial markets have exhibited in the past. He doesn’t say that financial markets are the wrong tool to address problems, but that their potential to do good work was stymied by “light touch regulation”.
He feels that moral markets, ones with the same values as responsible individuals and countries, can coalesce into powerful tools for public good and environmental salvation.
Many people will have a great deal of trouble accepting his view of the finance business as the absolutely incredible failures leading to the financial collapse of 2008 cost 6 million Americans their homes and 8 million their jobs. Losses around the world were on top of this.
That the seemingly innocent factor of “light touch regulation” was to blame would stick in many craws. Even after this incredible disaster, that built up over decades of excess, Carney still expresses admiration for Alan (“Oops!) Greenspan, the individual whose job it was to regulate the industry. Greenspan’s equally innocent “irrational exuberance” commentary belies what was effectively the plundering of the world’s money system and the middle and working classes by sociopaths driven solely by greed.
Does moral suasion work on sociopaths, especially if they are being made wealthy by immoral acts? Does “rebalance” cover the changes needed to fix the immense problems in banking?
The magnitude of the fraud has reached into the scores of trillions of dollars in transfers from productive working people to unproductive finance people. In other words, from the 99% to the 1%. And it took $15 trillion of public money pumped into the banking system to keep it functioning. And to keep those bonus cheques flowing.
Bernie Sanders puts the take from this theft (“transfer”) at $50 trillion. One look at the scale of the dollars printed, and in particular bank profits in Canada, supports that estimate. Sanders put this transfer down to executives taking more of profits but really, most of this is due to money-printing inflation done by banks.
Post the 2008 meltdown, no one, save one Muslim bank employee, was prosecuted or went to jail for the largest theft in history. This would possibly be better termed as the theft larger than all previous thefts in history combined. And that one banker was given just 30 months in jail and fined $150,000 or about 2 ½ days of his annual $7 million salary.
“Greenspan relied on the self-interest of financial market participants to limit profit taking.” What band of pirates ever moderated their plundering of a treasure ship to avoid ruining the good name of piracy? What did regulators think was going to happen?
Admitting you were wrong doesn’t make criminal negligence OK. “I didn’t know the gun was loaded “is not a defense when someone is shot during a robbery. Yet despite the fact Greenspan clearly had no concept of what he was doing (or was guilty of criminal conspiracy) he managed to accumulate a net worth of $20 million. His friends, the people he was paid to regulate, did very much better.
Carney’s approach to bringing financial markets to heel involves soft measures such as Values-Based Leadership. On top of that, he proposes adding an extra couple of layers of bureaucracy for monitoring and encouraging but not enforcement. It is very much more of a pep talk than the threat of a SWAT raid and hard time.
Carney intends to monetize social and environmental outcomes i.e. blend into the market system, but once monetized and embedded, the hazy, wobbly connections and valuations are never well-understood or even understandable and can never be effectively challenged. This is the financial tail wagging the national dog. Markets can’t lead change although they can optimize it.
Carney will encourage fair markets (5 points program) and effective markets (4 points program) but suggests nothing to hardwire financial markets to the real wealth creation process. In terms of fulfilling their responsibility to the public, banks have only 2 jobs:
- maintaining financial stability
- getting funds into the hands of people who produce real wealth
But the banking industry have manipulated their privileged position to fabricate a galaxy of financial mechanisms which spin immense profits for themselves while generating no added value. Basically multi-step counterfeiting. Complexity will corrode any management system no matter how well engineered or intended.
Carney wants to upgrade financial technology to assure all dollar decisions are climate rational with the real abatement costs of carbon and environmental damage built in. But fully accurate biophysical pricing is extremely complicated to calculate and it can be gamed and corrupted.
Finance is a technocratic peripheral service, an important tool but not a core driver of progress or prosperity. It can enable wealth creation but it cannot itself create wealth and should not be abused to siphon off massive wealth for those running it.
In many ways Mark Carney has a refreshing outsider’s view of the finance world but his banking remedies are very much that of an insider. Which is to say complex financial mechanisms which have never worked reliably in the past and are prone to corruption and gaming.
Disconnect
All through “Values”, Mark Carney calls for growth. Here he does not differentiate between prosperity, population growth, GDP growth or consumption growth. Presumably “growth” in this book means a combination of population growth and commercial market growth (increasing GDP). But in calling for simple growth, he is automatically cutting some of the efforts to achieve his stated objectives off at the knees.
What has actually happened in Canada and Western countries generally?
Canada and most developed countries have seen their economies hollowed out by globalism with great costs to a large segment of their populations and great benefit to small elites. There has been a huge transfer of wealth from lower and middle income earners to the very wealthiest segment of the population. Faith in government and the media has plummeted and populism of all shades is on the rise.
He calls for high quality jobs while growth has produced low quality jobs. Fiscal balance and a strong social safety net can only be supported by high quality and tax positive jobs.
Carney, in his consistently soft handed approach, recommends fine tuning when complete re-purposing and restructuring of the financial system is required.
He endorses the hopium of Carbon Capture and Storage, hydrogen and biofuels (ethanol). He points out that equality boosts growth in developed countries but does not cite analysis showing growth’s negative impact on equality.
Growth, the deliverer of a multiplicity of social toxins, is repeatedly served up as the remedy. The Thatcher – Reagan revolution “unleashed new dynamism “ but the money-printing underpinnings of this “revolution” offered little of substance other than massive debt and transfer of wealth to the rich.
At least Carney hears some of the public sentiment on the finance world’s operation and cites the social contract breaking down post 2008 financial meltdown. But he is way late. If he had been better connected to Main Street he would have heard about this much earlier and in much stronger terms. As it is, acknowledging the problem after it cratered is thin gruel.
His two decades late revelation would be greeted on the street by a hearty round of “No Shit Sherlock” jeers. And written in 2022 this is like someone in the first class lounge of the Titanic remarking that the ship appeared to be taking on water well after the steerage decks (conveniently locked down) have flooded.
Still he acknowledges that in the financial crisis “Free markets, free trade, and open capital markets reigned supreme”. Yet, in the very next sentence cites the period also featured “very real boosts to prosperity”. But for whom?
His response to Queen Elizabeth’s question of why no one noticed these problems was to cite “failure of elites’ imagination”. Either that or they simply didn’t understand the system past their own pocket books and managed to ignore reams of commentary calling out the massive problems stacking up.
Again Carney applies soft love as a solution in the creation of an international Financial Stability Board. With no power to prosecute or imprison, it is no more than just another advisory committee layer of bureaucracy and obfuscation when a finance SWAT team is really called for.
Carney proposes Carbon Councils to improve the effectiveness of climate policies by making all policies consistent with abatement. But how then does this square with his support and involvement with the Century Initiative as tripling our population and then growing forever after is the worst environmental policy imaginable.
Piling scores of millions of people on Canada’s harsh but delicate landscape requires extreme levels of resources (and carbon emissions) to support. The carbon footprint of Canada’s immigrant stream quadrupoes when they move here.
His current level of immigration tracks the Century Initiative targets and, at 400,000 annually, is 5 times the balanced level. (See interactive population projection graphs to see the impacts of various population scenarios.)
Carney also fails to connect the dots on social impacts and is apparently not aware of Canada’s equality decline “innovative policies have helped buffer us against waves of inequality”. In fact Canada went from #2 in the world in the early 1960s to mid-30s now – an unmatched decline. Rapid growth has made Canada the poster boy for equality decline and the very wave of failure he warns against.
Good Intentions
Mark Carney has good intentions if his prescriptions for a revitalized market system are to be believed. His approach is one of encouraging banks to operate on a higher moral plane with social and environmental outcomes fused into their decision making.
New morality post-2008 is needed but are the banks, as they are structured and led by the people they are, capable of embracing this change? Scarcely 2 years after the “wealth effect” promotion which was part of the pre-2008 financial collapse ended, finance started up with “asset enhancement” as a their new motto. What changed?
Yet to his credit, Carney points out the market is one thing – self-interested. Further he laments the market economy turning our societies into market societies where the nation is nothing more than a market to policy makers and citizens nothing more than consumers, renters and cheap labour.
But with slightly re-tuned financial regulation he feels “this time can be different”. He wants the political process to define goals and then “marshal” the markets but makes no reference to structuring the markets. (more light hand???)
Carney critically identifies the difference between real wealth creation and transfer of real wealth. Surprisingly he describes rent as theft but fails to point out that so is counterfeiting via fractional banking driven valuation inflation.
And he makes no reference to structuring the market in a biophysical framework for anything other than CO2 emissions. Energy metrics like the key EROI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) and the storage issues of an electricity based economy at northern latitudes are not even hinted at. See this video for a short and clear explanation of EROI.
Carney clearly mentions Adam Smith’s observations relating to the conspiracy of industry to influence national policy in their own interest. This is exactly why banks, developers, speculators and cheap labour employers created the Century Initiative lobby group.
More nuggets of morality and sharp observation are salted throughout “Values”. The Bank of England charter reads: “Promote the public good and benefit of our people”. Carney points out the difficulty of fixing something for the future that most people don’t think is currently broken in his observation there are “no obvious rewards to tough decisions necessary to avoid future crises.”
Currency Reality
Thankfully he clearly states “Bitcoin doesn’t work,” although he might have added “except as a con.” But that kind of terminology just doesn’t show up in Values. He does hold out hope for Stablecoins to become a currency for international trade. These would be an international currency based on a basket of currencies or, perhaps even better, a basket of real value commodities like energy, copper, steel, aluminum, wheat and rice.
Through history, the very few long term successful currencies had real backing and may have been real commodities like Egyptian wheat banks and commodity backed notes used in the early days of the British Empire. See The Perfect Currency.
Carney recognizes that GDP does not represent well-being which is something all politicians should be clear on. In a nutshell, Carney’s view and hope is that Moral Markets will dig us out of the hole into which immoral markets have plunged us.
Leadership Ethos
“Values” offers solid advice for investors and businesses. Clearly investors need to weigh risks of public policy shifts and extreme events. This is good Black Swan avoidance advice which will allow socially and environmentally mindful executives to be blindsided far less often.
And most executives do indeed have a long gaze over their surroundings. A good illustration is Trump’s first term promise to “bring back coal” which had zero chance of success. Natural gas was ½ the price and had 1/2 the emissions. Generating plant executives can read a climate chart as well as anyone and wouldn’t put another nickel into coal generating plants when future emissions regulations would be almost certain to mothball them.
Climate change will have a massive and broad impact on our society and Carney emphasizes this by noting the “financial system cannot diversify its way out of risk,” Everything is going to be changing.
Josiah Wedgewood, a leading businessman of the Industrial Revolution in England, is shown to be a social activist who was anti-cheap labour (called slavery in the day), anti-outsourcing, pro-tariff and pro-broad-based economy. In other words, he would be categorized as a “Trumper” by the modern globalist press.
Carney praises Wedgewood yet this moral businessman, a prototypal Henry Ford, is his polar opposite in terms of the open border trade policies Carney seeks to implement. He wants to create small business incubators but these don’t work if you leave the door open via free trade. Small and Medium businesses (SMEs) can only develop as a broad base behind a tariff wall. Free trade creates an oxygen-free environment for developed countries’ SMEs as the past 40 years has so painfully shown.
Allowing more outsourcing is just another way to lower wages and transfer more wealth into the hands of the finance cult.
Globalism vs Responsible Government
Is Carney not aware of all of the financial distortions and manipulations underlying the simplistic “comparative advantage” concept? Again he speaks from a market point of view, not a national interest point of view.
Carney acknowledges in a roundabout way immigration keeps productivity low but never makes the connection with housing inflation, inequality, budget deficits or missed environmental targets. He recognizes that “Globalism has simultaneously brought great prosperity and caused tremendous misery.”
Yet he doesn’t spell out who benefited and who suffered and why. Given his open border stance, it is likely he feels uncomfortable elaborating but below is the free trade scorecard.
Winners
China and many developing nations were able to quickly develop their manufacturing and research capabilities and build broad industrial bases. Their standards of living rocketed upwards. Raising these countries out of poverty to become more capable and stable was a good thing.
Losers
The Western world lost millions of high-skill, highly paid jobs and millions of workers and their communities suffered great losses. Production and research capability withered and the economic base dramatically narrowed. The effects of loss of tax base on community, regional and country budgets and services were socially destructive. While the hollowing out of the economy’s productive engine occurred, the growth of the finance industry filled in with dollars but not with substance. Commercial economists couldn’t tell the difference.
Repatriating manufacturing will take decades.
Biggest Winners
The finance industry gained access to huge money flows across borders and the opportunity to create (print) debt. They skimmed immense profits from fluctuating exchange rates and currency trading. The finance industry is now larger than the manufacturing sector in many western countries while producing no real wealth.
The outcome was the exact reverse for people in Western countries than that promised by the globalist controlled media. It must be recognized that in any negotiations between nations, there is always an unseen third party sitting at the table: the finance industry.
Grasp of Reality (Real World Mechanisms)
The biophysical world and the world of commercial banking exist on the same planet but that is about the only things they have in common. Finance holds sway over much of the western world but the societies it controls exist at the pleasure of Mother Nature.
Mother Nature speaks, listens and acts in purely biophysical units, tons, kg, kWh, yields, Sverdrups, etc. Carney has immersed himself in the world of finance where there is but one unit of measure, the $, yet seems to have not so much as stuck a toe out into the larger biophysical world. All of his references in “Values” come from finance based corporations and media.
Carney immerses himself in their reports while likely depending on the very narrow and shallow “mainstream media” of the Globe and Mail and The Economist as trusted sources for his worldview. These are growth fixated and growth dependent organizations.
He therefore misses on very fundamental issues created by flawed metrics and misunderstood stocks and flows of inputs critical for real wealth creation.
- He envisions correctly that we will be and must become an electrified society (mostly) but adding 60 million people which is what the current “reduced” immigration levels are tracking, will require the addition of approximately 1200 300 MW Small Nuclear Reactors (SMR). Has Carney told Toronto voters that the GTA (with a population of ~ 30 million by 2100) will be getting over 250 nuclear reactors spread across their area?
- And then there are the electricity storage capacity issues which represent the real difficulty in transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables in a northern country. He mentions the falling cost of generation in $/kWh but not the cost of storage or its impact on EROI.
- Ditto the supposed CO2 silver bullets of Carbon Capture and Storage, biofuels and hydrogen. These are niche solutions at best and mostly don’t work at scale. Many regard them as fossil fuel industry promoted misdirections. For instance ethanol at Canadian latitudes produces almost as much carbon as it saves. The policy analysis of it has been done on a dollar basis with no EROI/lifecycle analysis. Ethanol is totally off the table in terms of energy and carbon but works financially for those playing it.
- Carney cites clickbait talking points such as 3D printing of houses in 2 days. This technology has been around for 40 years and doesn’t work in practice. Looks impressive though and implies building 500,000 home a year will be a doable.
- He states that CO2 emissions vary by urban and rural regions but omits latitude. A serious omission since energy intensive life in the north produces far higher emissions levels than the lower energy consumption in more temperate zones.
- Carney does mention that stock of natural/capital per person has declined by 40% in past 30 years but doesn’t mention the effect of population growth/mass immigration.
- He dangles the possibility of 90% renewable energy by 2035 (likely from researcher Jacobson who has backed away from this)
In Canada, in order for residences to become energy positive, the cost per residence will be in the neighbourhood of $125,000. For people paying an ever increasing percentage of their incomes just to own a house, this is something that is never going to happen. - At low levels of penetration clean energy can be competitive – ignoring the extreme difficulty in northern regions. Carney brings up hydrogen for storage which is critical for allowing high levels of renewable penetration but he doesn’t seem to add storage costs on to renewable energy costs. This changes both the financial and energy math dramatically.
It simply takes more energy, resources, work and organization to establish and maintain a sophisticated society in northern latitudes. Resources are less rich, energy is harder to gather and infrastructure must be much more intensive. And the overarching reality on our small and depleting planet is that resource economies of scale are now negative. That is, the more resources we require, the higher will be their unit costs as we access ever less-rich deposits.
Markets are optimizers of available resources, not magic wands which can overcome physics.
Making Connections
“Values” contains many references to negative outcomes and problems in the real world which Carney would like to change. But he does not seem to be able to make the very direct connections between and among many of these problems and their origin.
He doesn’t seem to grasp the connection between the decline of job quality – cheap labour growth – and structural deficits and the decline of public services and infrastructure. He decries turning the nation into a market but seems to accept the profitization of housing through inflation and debt. And oh, those bank profits!!
In a rare admission for a charter member of the finance club, he ACKNOWLEDGES FEW PEOPLE UNDERSTAND COMPLEX MARKET STRATEGIES; the black box of financial market machinations and declares that the “financial system drifted from its role of serving the real economy”. A remarkable and laudable statement.
But he doesn’t extend the logic and ask why many elements of the investment banking system are allowed to exist. Why should any business be allowed to exist that is not productive? And in his overly gentle treatment of the finance industry, it has to be stated that the north of $50 trillion in North America alone they lifted from the publics’ pockets is a long way from “straying”; it is “stole the car and fled.” And it should be treated as such.
Carney learned from the Lehman Bros bank “that the financial system could not be fixed in the middle of a crisis”, a good lesson for fixing national policy before we hit the class 6 white water rapids of climate change and resource depletion.
Overall Carney promotes the monetization of all goods and processes so the resulting valuations can allow the market to grind out solutions. But making all goods rationally priced for optimal social and environmental outcomes is a pig that won’t fly.
Rather, putting the market cart behind the structural horse allows the market to exploit opportunities within defined environmental and social bounds. Depending on very loosely connected levers with no direct connection or means of tracking progress as Carney does is an open door to corruption and misguided policies.
Fixated on Growth
Carney claims not to be a market fundamentalist but he is certainly is a true-believer in growth. Whatever the problems are, he believes their solutions will be found along the pathway to a bigger (and therefore better) society. Time and again he conflates growth with the solutions to problems when in fact it is the cause of those problems.
“WE WON’T ACHIEVE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS WITHOUT GROWTH.” However, ever-lasting growth (as differentiated from progress) means chronic resource depletion and energy shortages meaning we will always fall short of sustainability.
The linchpin of this entire view is faith in the GDP metric but there are many problems with using that measure of commercial market size which Carney readily admits. Nothing in Carney’s approach adds up to an operational line of logic. This is clearly illustrated by the last 50 years of OECD record growth in Canada but it drove a massive decline in equality and life satisfaction, particularly among the young.
The Gross Domestic Product was a set of accounts designed to serve as the basis for an equitable tax system. Its creators warned against using it as a measure of national or individual well-being or as being used to develop national policy. We need to know what we are counting because the metric very quickly becomes the goal. Cash flow is an unsuitable basis for policy development.
Even without factoring corruption, growth has not worked to make Canada, or any other developed country, a better place to live or more resilient in the face of environmental and economic challenges.
We all have to love the term “aggregate progress” Carney uses. It implies that yes, there were problems but on the whole everything got better. No, it didn’t. GDP went up through money printing and a small corrupt minority absconded with a huge portion of the national wealth from the pockets of the great majority. Everybody else? Not so good.
Carney’s proposal of cooperative internationalism is apparently a new term for globalism in which there is one massive economy with policies controlled by markets and those who profit from them. This is in contrast to cooperative development where all nations build broad based economies and control their own social policies.
That would be like a community of healthy nations with good and orderly tariff fences rather than an endless fenceless ghetto sprinkled with a few sparkling glass towers.
Who is the Tail and Who is the Dog?
Ultimately, Carney believes he can guide the finance community to call the right shots which will lead to the resolution of society’s major challenges. He does not see finance as a tool to be used as needed but as a leading force. History would suggest this is doomed to being just another “this time is different”.
Financial markets have proven to be absolutely corrosive for social progress time and time again. Once they are left on their own to make their own rules (to “innovate”) they evade oversight and just get on with profiteering.
Monetary systems are extremely hard to regulate even in their simplest form using very simple money as their media. Introducing more complex measures makes them absolutely unmanageable and even more open to corruption.
Conflicting Priorities: The Growth Dilemma
The disconnects and the dependence on finance and fixation with endless growth all add up to many conflicting priorities once policy meets the ground. Growth demands that we effectively ride off madly in all directions.
- Faster decarbonization
- Better jobs
- Higher population growth
- Building 500,000 homes a year
- Saving farmland
- Access to nature
- Higher consumption
As far as delivering on all of these priorities and many more, as long as both population and consumption growth are part of the mix, achieving progress on the other fronts is now impossible. Canada’s and the world’s days as “an unlimited treasure chest of resources” are over.
“Markets are the most powerful instrument humans have ever created” – may not be true, but misused, or allowed to go feral, they become powerfully dangerous. They can’t be allowed to do the thinking or set their own priorities.
Society has to be able to differentiate between productive and non-productive commercial activity and use markets to deliver on the former. Finance is a background support service and should never be seen as a stand-alone industry.
Critical Errors
Our complex society is infused with many critical errors and assumptions which have worked their way into our decision making as fact. Not coincidentally, these misconceptions often serve specific groups.
We have been using arcane metrics as goals, conflating consumption with happiness and better with bigger. How did we get to this point and how do we correct them?
Below are a few key slips Carney makes:
– “the world economy has decoupled from CO2 emissions”. Which is to say that productive activity is increasing while CO2 emissions are not implying we are over the carbon hump. But that is not entirely correct because unproductive activity (think financial sector) is included in GDP and once netted out for unproductive growth, the picture changes. Has technology allowed us to produce more with less? Absolutely, but at the same time our cost of living is being increased by resource depletion (higher cost per unit of resource) which is real, not printed, inflation.
- Carney mis-states GDP as “standard measure of economic value” instead of “a measure of cash flow”. “Value” implies substance, i.e. a net gain of real wealth, whereas flow indicates transfer of real wealth.
- He states “GDP is a measure of the flow – that is the increase in wealth” CRITICAL ERROR!! Flow is not wealth creation.
- GDP is cash flow – money transfer representing paid activity. It is NOT an addition to the stock of wealth but rather it is a measure of activity which may or may not have been productive.
Example: A hurricane wipes out a town. There is a huge loss of real wealth. A great deal of activity then takes place to rebuild and recover and this paid activity makes the GDP go up. But there has been a decline in real wealth due to asset loss which may not be recovered for decades. Similarly, the large scale entrance of females into the paid workforce inflated GDP numbers. Previously unpaid work like meals and care is farmed out to paid providers. Paid work goes up, real output doesn’t change nearly as much.
Hence Carney’s conflates the growth of financial markets with national well-being. Just because they process a great deal of money and end up keeping a sizable portion of it, does not mean there is a commensurate or even any increase in real wealth.
The danger we fall into is that decision makers are unclear of the difference between using markets to deliver policy and allowing market players to determine policy.
Bottom Line
Mark Carney would like to see himself as being on the right side of the progressive equation and doing good things. He sets himself apart from those he sees as purely motivated by money, yet his devotion to financial markets may be just as strong.
He is aware of the some of the damage globalism and rigged markets have done but he seems to be unwilling to acknowledge the malfeasance and deep structural damage done to people, communities, the nation and the planet by free trade, mass immigration and unhinged printing money.
He sees himself as moral yet never blew the whistle on his finance associates.
His sensibilities are very much at odds with his stated policy directions.
For anyone wanting to solve Canada’s problems and make it more sustainable while delivering a better life for Canadians, the very last people they would be working with would be the Century initiative.
This is not an attempt to pick apart Mark Carney and his positions in a manner designed to make him look bad. Given his background, many of his positions are a welcome surprise. In fact, he seems more connected and forward looking than most of Canada’s public figures. But that does not mean he is able to break the mold enough to make a real difference.
Carney is not now a disruptor and the changes we need to make in the time we have to make them must necessarily be disruptive. Fine tuning at this point in the game is a fatal error given the meta-crisis we face. It is time to pull the goalie.
Clearly, Carney is a team player but is he skating for Canada or Team Globalist Growth? Does he know himself?
Right now he is clearly sharing the bench with the Century Initiative with its banks, media corporations pushing endless growth and forming what is truly the most powerful lobby in the western world. There is a huge democratic disconnect with the growth agenda as over 80% of Canadians want the population to grow no larger and a similar percentage don’t want immigration used to alter our cultural and ethnic makeup.
No polls are available on whether Canadians want higher housing costs, longer commutes, worse health care, less access to nature and lower quality jobs but are polls really necessary here?
Carney’s housing solution of building 500,000 homes annually effectively drops a new additional City of Toronto onto the Canadian landscape every two+ years. A total social and environmental fail. Tens of millions of dogcrate condos can’t be seen as a positive solution.
Carney appears to be more comfortable in the fog of money than he is under the harsh light of biophysics. He appears to accept monetary valuations from all the usual sources without digging any deeper even though these sources have been proven misleading time and time again
Consequently: This time will not be different
Canada and the western world have to deal with the finance cult and take back operational control of our societies. Mark Carney will give the finance cult more power hoping it will be used more responsibly than it ever has been before.
Carney says he is not a market fundamentalist and certainly his listing of the failures of the market system and the damage monetization of policy have done makes that clear. But he is still a man of faith in the markets and faith, above all, in growth to eventually lift all boats. He has faith in the system, faith in its people and faith in their monetary tools.
Mark Carney is very much a growth fundamentalist. He has put all of his chips on a growing economy and his ability to reliably guide the markets towards delivering positive social and environmental outcomes.
But by a taking few short steps out of the money world and into the 3D biophysical world, it is plain for everyone to see that the social and environmental pit that that the tripling of Canada’s population is digging, will be impossible to climb out of.
Even if the banks were led by and staffed with Franciscan monks, the mountain of damning evidence is that growth is no longer a viable option for a progressing or even a workable society on our depleting and over-developed planet. We need to pivot from growth to progress.
Justin Trudeau might not have been expected to comprehend the massive structural damage he has done to Canada but at least Mark Carney gives us reason to believe he understands the concept of damage. So far his faith in growth and the mechanism of the markets prevents him from looking for a means of implementing real structural change.
Will Mark Carney as Prime Minister, hand even more power over to a group whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the Canadian public? Or will he step up and blow the whistle and lead Canada onto the path of progress and sustainability?
