Carney too sensible for scrutiny
February 3, 2026 10:42 AM
A short piece came out on the Globe and Mail last week about an interview that Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, did with CTV’s Question Period on Jan 23.
The Globe piece contained a couple of quotes from the interview, most notably the ones where Carney referred to the U.S. as a “reclining world power,” and encouraged Canadians to “build their game” in emerging Asian markets.
I don’t mind telling you, when I found out, I was ecstatic.
Not because I’m now going to rush out and buy stock in Asian companies or funds: I have neither the cash nor the inclination.
No, I was excited because this seemed like exactly the kind of tossed-off report on a self-interested fluff piece by a despicable Person in Power that I love to sink my teeth into, after a quick crash course in (in this case) economics and international monetary policy.
All in a week’s work.
I had a great angle, fantastic hook, all about how so-called “experts” in economics and politics, policy wanks, brazen pundits with their own TV shows (hell, their own networks, it sometimes seems) couldn’t predict their way out of a paper bag, much less a global recession.
I even had a source to back me up: a book-long, hyper-researched rant about that very subject called Future Babble, written by Dan Gardner.
It’s subtitled “Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway.” Perfect! My leisure reading (yeah, I know) magically turning itself into an article.
This article would be filled with horror stories of how bureaucrats and analysts are unbelievably overconfident, and use whatever soapboxes and publishing houses they can find to make bombastic, over-the-top predictions.
Invariably, these predications are about either how the world is going to imminently collapse (see: Population Bomb, Famine 1975!) or how we will never ever have bad economic times ever again (hello, Dow 36,000).
All of this remains true.
Expert predictions regarding the future of the economy at large, commodities prices, oil supply and demand, how technological advances are likely to affect industry, global politics, and just about everything else, are so apt to fail that, were you to make a drinking game out of it, Antigonish cops would be busier than they are for Burmac.
Sadly for my grandiose article plans, Mark Carney does not, or at least did not in his interview with Question Period, behave like a typical untrustworthy expert.
Carney was moderate in his claims, focused on Canadian recovery from the recession of the last couple of years, and referred almost entirely to things that happened in the past.
The one prediction he did make, or at least repeat, was that Canada’s economy is expected to grow by a moderate 4 per cent this year.
His advice seemed sound, too. Far from the Asian-market hard sell I was expecting, Carney was cautious, shying away from calling the U.S. economy dangerous or weak, and advocating modest diversification, not an investment free-for-all.
He warned consumers and banks alike away from taking advantage of today’s super-low interest rates to the point that, when interest rates invariably rise, the cycle of defaulting starts again.
At the end of the interview, he even acknowledged that big bank bailouts, where the government (read: taxpayers) pour millions of dollars into propping up a failed private enterprise, need to be reined in, and banks, should they fail, be allowed to “collapse in an orderly fashion.”
Well, this is Canada after all.
So. Rational advice, not dependent on what’s supposed to happen in five years, either at home or away.
Consumer-focused, not spouting “too big to fail” dogma, not irretrievably tied, financially, to the US or any other country.
Kind of rant-killing, reasonableness is.
Well, Mark Carney, you have succeeded in making me slightly less cynical than I would like to be.
No wonder Time named you its 21st most influential person for 2010.
It’s too bad, all the same. That other article would have been fun to write.
