
Carney is yet to make his mark; Manmohan Singh made his long ago
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mark Carney, sworn in as the 24th Prime Minister of Canada on Friday, is a newbie in the world of politics. But then, so was the late Manmohan Singh, till former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao made him our finance minister in 1991.
Indeed, the parallels between the paths taken by Singh and Carney are uncanny. Both pursued higher studies in Economics at Oxford University and went on to get their doctorate degree from Nuffield College: Singh in the early 1960s and Carney in the early 1990s. In age, they’re 33 years apart.
Both served as the heads of their respective central banks. Manmohan Singh was the 15th governor of the Reserve Bank of India (1982-85). Carney, the head of two central banks, was the eighth governor of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013) and then the 120th governor of the Bank of England (2013-2020), the first non-Briton in its history of more than three centuries to lead it.
While Singh came from India’s Planning Commission to head RBI, Carney served as deputy governor in the Bank of Canada before returning to head it after a brief stint as senior associate deputy minister at the department of finance. Carney worked in the private sector—at Goldman Sachs—while Singh was an out-and-out public-sector man. As central bank heads, both faced challenging times.
Singh oversaw the transition from a very regimented system to a more market-friendly one through comprehensive legal reforms of banking. Carney had to deal with the global financial crisis while heading Canada’s central bank and then with the fallout of Brexit and the early years of covid during his tenure at Britain’s. That’s not all.
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