Mark Carney | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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Mark Carney

Mark Carney, economist, banker, civil servant (b at Fort Smith, NWT 16 March 1965). Mark Carney is the second-youngest person to assume the top job at the BANK OF CANADA, after Graham F. TOWERS, the bank's first governor.

Mark Carney

Mark Carney, economist, banker, civil servant (b at Fort Smith, NWT 16 March 1965). Mark Carney is the second-youngest person to assume the top job at the BANK OF CANADA, after Graham F. TOWERS, the bank's first governor. Like his two brothers, Carney attended Harvard University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics in 1988. Following a stint at investment firm Goldman Sachs, he returned to school at England's Oxford University earning a master's degree and a doctorate in economics, in 1993 and 1995 respectively. Rejoining Goldman Sachs upon graduation, Carney rose through the ranks to become the firm's Toronto-based Managing Director, Investment Banking in 2002.

Mark Carney's career as a civil servant began in August 2003, when he successfully applied to become one of the Bank of Canada's four deputy governors. Thirteen months into the position, Carney was appointed (on a secondment basis) to be the senior associate deputy minister in the Department of Finance. In this function he represented Canada's finance interests at G-7 meetings and oversaw the sell-off of the government's stake in PETRO-CANADA. Turning down opportunities to become the deputy minister in two government departments, he returned to the Bank of Canada in November 2007 as Advisor to the Governor, having been tapped for the top job one month earlier. In 2008 he was appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada and in 2011 was named head of the Financial Stability Board, an organization based in Basel Switzerland that was set up to recommend strategies for stabilizing the world's banking systems following the global monetary crisis.

In his position as Governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney received widespread praise and a high public profile. In 2009, Britain's Financial Times named him one of the 50 international figures who would "frame the way forward" and was selected by Time in 2010 as on the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2012 he was selected for the prestigious position of head of the Bank of England, taking over the job in June of 2013.