https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/18/mark-carney-the-wrongest-man-at-the-wrongest-time-ever/
The politicization of business and capital markets has many fathers. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, one of the most prominent and unrelenting advocates for “sustainability” in investing, is often described as such. Klaus Schwab, the now-retired chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum, also often wears that title. So does the billionaire political gadfly Michael Bloomberg; so does R. Edward Freeman, the business professor and originator of “stakeholder theory;” and so do countless others who have worked diligently to advance ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance investing), DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and all the other efforts to make business and investing more “socially responsible” or less unfair or…whatever.
Of all those responsible for this abuse of business and capital markets, perhaps no man is more singularly responsible—yet nearly totally overlooked by ESG’s critics—than Mark Carney. Carney is a banking and economic giant. He was the Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008-2013 and the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013-2020. It was in this latter capacity that, in September 2016, Carney gave one of the most important and influential speeches in the history of central banking. Appearing at an event in Berlin, Carney gave a very carefully and very confrontationally worded address, in which he addressed climate change and framed its mitigation in fiscal and fiduciary terms. “A wholesale reassessment of prospects, as climate-related risks are re-evaluated,” Carney intoned, “could destabilise markets, spark a pro-cyclical crystallisation of losses and lead to a persistent tightening of financial conditions: a climate Minsky moment.”
A “Minsky moment” is a market term named for the economist Hyman Minsky, which is used to identify the point at which a bull market has become so speculative and over-leveraged that it hits a peak and then tips over and crashes. What Carney meant by predicting a “climate-related” Minsky moment was that he—and others, presumably—believed that global capital markets were already overleveraged, already well overbought, given the inevitability of climate change. As a result, once investors started to understand the reality of the climate “crisis,” they would come to realize how foolish and speculative their investments in “unsustainable” businesses were, leading to a crash. Or to put it more simply, Carney—the Governor of the Bank of England—was warning global investors and politicians that they either had to force business in general to become environmentally sustainable immediately or could face commercial and economic Armageddon.