Mark carney

I voted Remain last year for two reasons. First, however irritating I found some aspects of the EU, I could not vote for the chaos I believed would follow a Leave victory. From the accession of Theresa May to the night of the general election, that looked like an excess of pessimism; now it looks like wise foresight. The second prong was an analysis of my own and my neighbours’ economic circumstances: in what sense was EU membership actually making us worse off? In my own case, not at all; local shops, hospitality outlets and tourist attractions, likewise. Subsidised hill farmers and fatter farming cats on the flatlands? Not really,

Yesterday Mark Carney – who hates it when politicians say anything about him – had a pop at Boris Johnson, ridiculing his optimistic approach to Brexit as seeking “cake and consumption”. Set aside the impropriety of the Bank of England governor making such a political swipe, Brexit was a deep psychological blow for people like Carney – but at least managed to give him an excuse to keep the economy on the drug of rock-bottom interest rates. Employment is at a record high, inflation is over the target but Carney said yesterday that he still doesn’t think it is “the time to begin that adjustment” – i.e. rate rises. The

As double acts go, it is probably not up there with Eric and Ernie, John and Paul, or even Liam and Noel. Even so, Mark and Phil, the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, certainly looked today as if they were working in tandem to try and steer the country towards a gentler version of Brexit than some of the harder men of that movement would prefer. Anyone listening to their speeches in the City this morning, postponed from last week in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, will have seen immediately what they were up to. Carney was at pains

No time has been lost in blaming Brexit for today’s rise in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) to 2.9 per cent. It wasn’t just those on the left, either. The head of Theresa May’s policy unit, George Freeman, tweeted this morning: ‘This is reality of the devaluation of the £ post Brexit’. While George Freeman has always been a staunch Remainer, the fact he put this out is possibly indicative of a change in attitude at Number 10 – an attempt to reach out to those in the party who continue to believe that Brexit is a mistake. Yet the longer the rise in CPI goes on the less it looks

Inflation is rising. Real wages are stagnant, and GDP is being revised downwards, putting us down there with the likes of Italy. If Theresa May had a script for the final fortnight of the election campaign it probably didn’t include figures like those. Today’s revision of the quarterly GDP number, down to a sluggish-looking 0.2 percent, from the initial 0.3 percent, will no doubt be seized upon by critics of the government, and by the increasingly battle-weary battalions of hardcore Remainers, as evidence that the wheels are finally coming off the economy, and the impact of a ‘hard Tory Brexit’ is finally being felt. In fact, however, it tells us

So, the Office of National Statistics has confirmed that the economy grew by 0.7 per cent in the last quarter of 2016, and by 1.8 per cent over the course of the year. Can we now please stop worrying about a post-Brexit recession and worry instead about an unsustainable consumer boom fed by interest rates which remain at panic levels. The bad news this morning is that the UK saving ratio – which is an estimate of the percentage of their income which households are saving – has fallen sharply from 5.3 per cent to 3.3 per cent. That takes it lower than it was a decade ago, just before

It is possible that Mark Carney is not quite the last person to notice that the post-Brexit economy is positively booming. Jean-Claude Junker might be too busy working out new ways to ‘punish’ Britain to have paid attention to the statistics. Gina Miller is possibly working on some bizarre High Court action to keep us in the EU. There might even be a leader writer somewhere at the FT who is still worrying away about the collapse of the economy. But just about everyone else has woken up to the fact that ever since we voted to leave the EU, the British economy, far from falling off a cliff, seems

It has been clear for some time that the pre-referendum warnings made by Bank of England governor Mark Carney were wide of the mark. Last May, he said that a vote for Brexit would pose an ‘immediate and significant threat’ to the UK economy, increasing unemployment, hitting growth, possibly to the point of recession. Today, however, the bank effectively admits that it was still being far too gloomy about the economy even last November. It upgraded its forecast for economic growth in 2017 from 1.4 per cent (as announced in the Autumn statement) to two per cent – saying that consumer spending has been stronger than expected and that the

The Guardian has a very significant story on its front page tomorrow. It has obtained notes of a meeting that Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, had with senior MEPs this week. These notes show that Barnier told them that he wanted a ‘special’ deal that would guarantee access for the EU firms and countries to the City of London’s financial markets. Interestingly, Barnier also said—according to The Guardian’s account—that ‘There will need to be work outside of the negotiation box … in order to avoid financial instability.” This suggests that Barnier shares Mark Carney’s view that there are financial stability risks for Europe if the EU cuts itself off

Mark Carney made himself some enemies during the referendum. It wasn’t only his gloomy prophecies that caused trouble. His willingness to speak out in the first place was enough to anger those who thought he should keep shtum on a politically-loaded topic like Brexit. Today, though, we saw a different Carney. Gone was the gloominess, and in place of his warning that the referendum was ‘the most significant’ risk to Britain’s financial stability, came the verdict that Britain was largely out of that particular storm. He told the Treasury select committee that: ‘Having got through the night, if you will, and the day after, the scale of the immediate risks

With Mark Carney stepping down from his role as governor of the Bank of England in 2019, it’s been widely reported that relations between Carney and Theresa May are strained. As James Forsyth writes in The Spectator, the Prime Minister managed to rub Carney up the wrong way with her Conservative conference speech when she appeared to criticise central banks and citizens of the world. At today’s Treasury select committee, Carney denied that May’s comments played a role in his decision to extend his contract by just 12 months. He did, however, appear to take a swipe at May over her choice words. When Andrew Tyrie — the committee chair — pointed out that May

For Mark Carney to have returned to-Canada after five years as Governor, as he originally planned, rather than serving until 2021, might by now have looked like a win for his critics — so adding an extra year, up to the end of Brexit talks in 2019, is a sidestep worthy of Strictly. Meanwhile, I was delighted to find ‘Might it be worth a flutter on Governor Rees-Mogg?’, the punchline of my last item on this subject (22 October), bouncing around the global media. Bloomberg reported ‘serious political magazines’ speculating that backbench Tory MP and Carney critic Jacob Rees-Mogg might be the Canadian’s replacement; the Daily Mail cited-Bloomberg likewise; and