Mark Carney: belief

Transcript context

…What was the most surprising thing you learned writing the book that you hadn’t known before you started? The most surprising thing that came to me as I was writing, but this was also in real time in the world, was this point about moving from a tradeoff approach on a big issue — the flattening of values, is what I talk about, to a hierarchy — just how powerful that can be in terms of market dynamics and investment. Something I believe, but I didn’t think I would necessarily see. What I’m talking about is that, over the course of the time of writing that book — it started before and it’s really accelerated after — is that the world has been moving more and more towards saying, “Let’s deal with climate change. Let’s anchor this on net zero, and then let’s figure out how to get there.” In that process, we talked a lot about the risks around climate change, but one of the core points in the book is that you can flip that risk into value creation if there’s a shared objective, the shared objective around net zero. That’s what we’re seeing today in financial markets and in the real economy. It surprised me that I had that thought with me, but I thought I would spend more time in the book about the values that are necessary for markets to function well, as opposed to this other point, which has the bigger real-world impact, which is, if you have a hierarchy of value, if you have a clear objective — and those don’t come along every day, but a clear social objective like sustainability, net zero said another way — just the power of the market that is starting to be unleashed as a consequence. What did you most learn about yourself writing the book?…

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