CARNEY REPORT CARD

Economists explain the grades they gave to outgoing Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney: A: “He’s at the top of the class of global central banks. When you look at some of the creativity that is now being copied in some parts of the globe, like his forward guidance, his work on financial stability, it would be hard to find many central bankers who had done a better job.”

— Craig Wright, Royal Bank chief economist

A– “He did not shy away from topics that can be very politically fractious, such as income inequality. But I have no idea if he was just in the right place at the right time. There’s a lot of things that could fall down because of his easy money policy, our household indebtedness problem are now at levels that eclipse where the Americans were before 2007.”

— senior economist Armine Yalnizyan, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

The governor will face a tougher test in England, where the central bank must guide an economy that continues to B+ “Most of the time, I think he took the right decisions and for the right reasons. But it is also true that he did not do so all the time. There was a golden opportunity to raise rates in the first half of 2011 and he took a pass. (That) would have been a much more powerful moral-suasion tool with respect to borrower behaviour than the watered down guidance that the Bank has had to hang on to ever since. So he’s human.”

— Jimmy Jean, economist, Desjardins Capital Markets

B– “On the negative side, he was slow to cut interest rates when the financial crisis hit. The Bank of Canada did not cut to 0.25 per cent until April 2009. By comparison, the Federal Reserve cut to zero in December 2008. Also, he failed to address the overvalued loonie. On the positive side, he has mostly resisted misguided calls to hike interest rates since the crisis.”

— Erin Weir, economist, United Steelworkers

teeter, and a banking sector badly in need of repair.

“There’s a whole new chapter to be written,” Robson said.