Mark Carney, left, at the time a deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, chats with U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan at a meeting of Group of Seven central bankers and finance ministers, Feb. 6, 2004, in Boca Raton, Fla. (Associated Press/David Adame)
He was born in a town of 2,400 on the southern edge of the Northwest Territories before graduating to the financial big leagues in Tokyo, London and New York and later the upper echelons of Canadian policy-making.
Now, Mark Carney takes his place in the international spotlight.
Carney, a 42-year-old adviser who used to work in the federal finance department, replaced retiring Bank of Canada governor David Dodge on Feb. 1, 2008.
"I always had a personal motivation to work in public policy," Carney told the Report on Business Magazine in 2005. "If you do, you should."
And he has. Here is a quick look at Carney's career:
- A native of Fort Smith, N.W.T., a town on the territory's southern border with Alberta, Carney earned his bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University in 1988.
- In the years after graduating, he went on to become an analyst at financial powerhouse Goldman Sachs in the U.K. and Japan, according to a statement released by the Bank of Canada.
- After receiving his Masters (1993) and PhD (1995) in economics from the University of Oxford, he rose through the firm's executive ranks. He became a managing director at Goldman Sachs in Toronto in 2002.
- Carney made the leap from investment banking in August 2003, joining the Bank of Canada as a deputy governor.
- Like Dodge before him, Carney assumes the Bank of Canada's top job after some experience in the Finance Department, where he was appointed the senior associate deputy minister in October 2004.
- He served as the point person for the financial services industry and was Canada's deputy for the G7 in recent years.
- Asked about the Finance job, Carney told Report on Business Magazine that he liked the responsibility and said "the people here are comparable in intelligence to the top-level people in any business."
- But if the talent was on par, the pay wasn't quite. At the time, the magazine said top investment bankers at Goldman Sachs could earn as much in a week as Carney would in an entire year.
His challenges included overseeing the $3.2-billion sale of the government's 19 per cent stake in oil producer Petro Canada in 2004, and in recent months, helping financial institutions deal with fallout from the global credit crunch.
With the crunch and the continued rise of the Canadian dollar, Carney takes over at the Bank in a time of upheaval. However, Kathryn Del Greco, a senior investment adviser at TD Waterhouse, believes he's up to the task. She told CBC News that Carney is a "well-educated man steeped in a great deal of experience" who will be a "very good fit for Canada."
Carney's tenure begins at a time when the Canadian economy is facing a major threat from a slowdown in the United States.
GDP figures released in May 2008 showed that the Canadian economy contracted by an annualized 0.3 per cent in the first quarter. So when the Bank of Canada met in June to consider its next move on interest rates, everyone was expecting a further rate cut.
But Carney, who had slashed the central bank's key lending rate by a full percentage point in his first two policy meetings, stunned economists by leaving rates alone. Early in his tenure, this governor showed he's clearly not afraid of defying market expectations.
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