Bank chief who can’t stop scaremongering

GIVEN his past as a banker with Goldman Sachs – arguably one of the world’s most amoral financial institutions – Mark Carney’s conduct during the referendum campaign will come as no surprise. Both the Governor of the Bank of England and Goldman – a bank which was inextricably linked to the greed and hubris that sparked the 2008 economic crash – have issued dire warnings about what fate awaits Britain post-Brexit. But while the bank, which has considerable financial links to the EU, has made its own position clear with a £500,000 donation to Remain, Mr Carney implausibly insists that he is neutral.

The Mail disagrees with him. We find it difficult to reconcile his lurid public statements about the dangers of leaving with his claim yesterday that he has limited himself to fulfilling the Bank’s ‘statutory responsibilities’.

Indeed, we ask what on earth is a Bank of England governor doing on chat shows like the Andrew Marr programme, as Mr Carney did last month, when he pointedly denigrated the Leave campaign.

And what a contrast between Mr Carney, who was plucked from Canada at great expense by his master, George Osborne, and the independent-minded governors of the past, such as Eddie George and Mervyn King, who more than once clashed with their political masters.

It is surely right, as former Tory leaders Lord Howard and Iain Duncan Smith, and former Chancellors Lord Lamont and Lord Lawson – a giant of the Treasury – argued yesterday, that the Bank is guilty of ‘startling dishonesty’ in the referendum debate. That four Tory grandees accused Mr Carney of ‘peddling phoney forecasts and scare stories’ should have caused him to pause. But within hours he was at it again, as the Bank bizarrely claimed we have stopped buying cars and going on holiday. (In fact retail sales figures were up 6 per cent in May.) Meanwhile, another friend of Mr Osborne’s, the IMF’s Christine Lagarde – a woman under the shadow of criminal charges for negligence in her handling of public funds – is due to issue yet more Brexit hysteria. This from the same IMF that proved so wrong when it told Britain repeatedly to relax its austerity policy.

Miss Lagarde, by the way, was a minister in France, a country that really does have economic and social problems, hardly a qualification for passing judgment.