What legacy will Carney leave the Bank of England?

Mark Carney steps down as Bank of England governor this weekend after almost seven years in the job. The Canadian oversaw big changes at the Bank, which was given more power in the wake of the financial crisis.

He also led efforts to support the economy through Brexit and the coronavirus outbreak. Mr Carney will leave the Bank more open and diverse than when he joined in July 2013, but his tenure has not been without controversy.

Here are some of the changes that happened on his watch. The world was very different in 2013. In the UK, economic growth was gaining traction, but unemployment was still high, at close to 8%. This led to speculation about the timing of the first post-crisis interest rate rise.

The Bank believed the economic recovery needed more time to take hold. It wanted to reassure people that borrowing costs would not rise any time soon, even if growth picked up.

Mr Carney had previously done this in Canada, which became the first G7 nation to raise interest rates after the global crisis. So the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee ( MPC) that sets interest rates tried something similar.

It said it wouldn't even start thinking about rate rises until unemployment fell to 7%. The Bank also added some conditions that would overrule this "forward guidance". These included any signs of runaway inflation, or threats to financial stability. But unemployment started falling much faster than the MPC had anticipated, quickly dipping below the 7% threshold.

David Miles, a bank policymaker between 2009 and 2015, was in favour of the policy at the time. He now says the various caveats made forward guidance confusing. The quick drop in unemployment raised speculation over interest rates. The Bank later changed its guidance to state that any rises would be "limited and gradual".

Mr Miles, an economics professor at Imperial College, London, said: "The problem always was that any explicit and public rule to guide future policy would need to be complicated and contain many caveats if it was one that allowed the MPC to react to unexpected events. "But that meant the guidance was of the form 'we will do X unless Y or Z were to happen in which case, then unless Q has happened, we will...'. I think in retrospect we got this wrong."

Martin Weale, another former MPC member who voted against the policy, agrees: "With hindsight, people found it much too complicated. I suppose they wanted a simpler story."

Mr Carney also came under fire for hinting at rate rises but not following through. MP Pat McFadden famously compared the Bank to an "unreliable boyfriend" for sending mixed messages to British households. Mr Carney has stressed all guidance is based on an "expectation not a promise", with interest rate decisions always data dependent. Michael Saunders, who currently sits on the MPC, said forward guidance is very useful to people who don't follow interest rate movements closely.

"Giving general guidance on the direction of interest rates over the next quarter to few years is very useful, allowing [people] to make well-informed financial choices," he recently told MPs. Interest rates were just 0.5% when Mark Carney joined the Bank of England. They're now even lower, at 0.25%.

With little room for rates to go lower still, the Bank's interest rate setters had to find new ways to support the economy. As well as increasing the Bank's bond buying - or quantitative easing (QE) programme - policymakers started buying corporate debt in the wake of the Brexit vote. They also created a new Term Funding Scheme (TFS) to support bank lending immediately after the referendum.

It offered cheap money - on the condition that commercial banks lent the cash to customers. This protected bank profit margins and got cash to worthy borrowers.

Under Mr Carney's leadership, the Bank also took steps to rein in borrowing without using interest rates. The Bank's Financial Policy Committee (FPC) took action in 2014 to prevent another housing bubble by imposing limits on the amount people can borrow to buy a home.