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A radical book that speaks out accessibly as to how we get everyone involved in solving our problems. And this is what we need: 50 Shades of People for 50 Shades of Green' - Bono In the ensuing months, I would meet Greta Thunberg a few times. ... This Swedish teenager challenges with a clarity and force of reason that belie her age. She reinforces the remorseless logic of a carbon budget that is rapidly being spent. Her determination lays bare the imperatives of climate physics and the scale of the challenge that we face. Mark Carney is a man with a plan, a bureaucratic consensus on how to use the financial system to help stop climate change. He is a very liberal man and so am I. I think that his goals are admirable and his suggestions are laudable, but I don’t know how all this is going to happen. He represents a global elite of power, and it is an iron law that power begets opposition to that power. There will be losers from any new system and those who know they will lose will fight tooth and nail to keep what they have. After sharing a bit of Greta Thunberg's speech, which he saw in person at the UN Climate Action Summit, he writes:
The reason I brought this book was the author, the handful of books I have read on economics are largely written by academics and journalists, who are merely observers. Mark Carney in his role as Governor of the Bank of Canada, and more recently the Bank of England, has lived and influenced our current financial system and has had a fount row seat for significant events, such as the financial crisis and Brexit. The book seems to be built on three verbs: need, should, and must. Carney is all about bankers and governments needing to do this and that. But the verbs are not followed by solutions. Carney’s needs and musts are about putting structure in place to analyze the effects of solutions should anyone come up with them. He himself has none. Here’s an example of what readers will encounter again and again, which they eventually realize are not so much profound as meaningless: I appreciate his thesis and the work he's put into realizing it, despite his blinkers on some core issues, and I'm glad he's working for the UN on the climate transition because I think he'll do a lot of good there. I'm glad I read the book although I already have blanked out anything to do with financial systems. Those who are interested in the ideas presented and would like to skip the money talk might better served by listening to his BBC Reith Lectures, which I heard on CBC Ideas: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/... How remarkable it is that that Carney’s signature can be on the banknotes of two separate countries. Quite a mark of achievement! Hope is not a strategy and to quote Tim Geithner’s refrain plan beats no plan. And a plan that is actually executed is the best one of all. Searching endlessly for the best is the enemy of the good.
Carney is forgiving of pretty much everything. Banking, finance and economics are continually evolving. What was true when we were on the gold standard is not true today. Rules made yesterday will need revising tomorrow. All the errors are forgivable. Central banker Mark Carney has diagnosed a crisis in value(s). He doesn’t just mean prices being misaligned with values as in frothy asset overvaluations. That’s just a symptom of a deeper malaise. The central idea of his book, says the Toronto Star’s Heather Scoffield, is that “… the world has devolved into a harsh, crisis-prone place by putting a monetary value or price on pretty much everything, and that erodes the societal values that hold the world together.” Carney seems to understand the universal attributes of leadership: purpose, perspective, clarity, competence, and humility. It’s certainly refreshing to review what makes a leader and perhaps we should ask this of our own heads of government in whichever country we live. He sees crisis occurring throughout history as an opportunity to question how and what we value, and that should change strategies that dictate how we deal with the future. One might have expected this book, written by someone who has been Governors of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England to be a dry, almost incomprehensible tome likely to propagate a much desired snooze at any time of day or night. To the contrary, it is very readable, lively and with a poetic use of language. However, there’s still much that I didn’t understand concerning the history, and stories of the many financial crises that in recent times have peppered our financial lives. So this book is not an easy read.
In Value(s), Mark Carney offers a vision of a more humane society and a practical manifesto for getting there. How we reform our infrastructure to make things better and fairer is at the heart of every chapter, with outlines of wholly new ideas that can restructure society and enshrine our human values at the core of all that we build for our children and grandchildren. What are central banks doing? “Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a coalition of seventy central banks, representing countries that generate almost three-quarters of the world’s emissions, have developed representative scenarios to show how climate risks might evolve and affect the real and financial economies.” They’re modeling. He keeps to that theme pretty much throughout, but it becomes endlessly repetitive once you understand how he thinks. He thinks like a bureaucrat. Despite knowing and working with the who’s who of finance, Carney is not about to criticize anyone else. Even for Alan Greenspan, whose hands-off administration led The Great Moderation of supposedly endless stability to the great financial crisis of 2008 (which for some has still not ended), Carney has no critique. The farthest he goes is to quote Greenspan himself at a congressional hearing where he admitted to being “partially wrong” after seeing the incredible greed of Wall Street in action. Otherwise, everything’s good. The first section of the book opens with some definitions. Values represent "principles or standards of behaviour; they are judgements of what is important in life," whereas value "is the regard that something is held to deserve - the importance, worth or usefulness of something." Increasingly, the value of an act, object, even person, is equated to its monetary value as determined by the market. At its most extreme this means that everything can be commoditised, with unavoidable consequences on societies values. As he comments, "when everything is relative, nothing is immutable."Unfortunately, the book is let down by the author; it is overly long and in places very dry, it's also quite jarringly self-aggrandizing (despite preaching the importance of humility on a number of occasions). The author’s final chapter is devoted to humility. That might sound an oxymoronic term when talking about Government or Big Business. However, Carney sees humility as the desirable and appropriate attitude to leading and governing. Drawing on the turmoil of the past decade, Mark Carney shows how 'market economies' have evolved into 'market societies' where price determines the value of everything. In this profoundly important new book, Carney argues that radical, foundational change is required if we are to build an economy and society based not on market values but on human values. A society that can work better for all. He comes over as a learned historian with a good education in the classics. Above all, one gets a sense of the author’s humanity. This book is also an economic treatise on the economic ills of the world and what do about it. We are in the middle of a new industrial revolution with the influence of a pandemic adding to the equation. Then in the USA, Carney cites the head of Morgan Stanley, James Gorman, answering a question in congressional testimony about “whether climate change really was a risk to financial stability: ‘It’s hard to have a financial system if you don’t have a planet.’”
Once they are brought into the regulatory net – as all forms of money eventually are – their attractiveness to many of their core users will cease.“ Our world is full of fault lines--growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. These fundamental problems and others like them, argues Mark Carney, stem from a common crisis in values. Drawing on the turmoil of the past decade, Mark Carney shows how "market economies" have evolved into "market societies" where price determines the value of everything.His recommendations to governments is that they should divide their expenditure into three categories: 1. COVID emergency, 2. Current basic ongoing programmes like childcare benefits or spending on defence and 3. Capital measures to boost the longterm productive capacity of the economy. His action plan is not naive aspirations but is based on certain core values: solidarity, fairness, responsibility, resilience, sustainability, dynamism and humility.
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