Mark carney

'The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,' says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. 'What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,' chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry.  Fink concedes that the economy remains 'highly dependent' on fossil fuels. He also asserts that BlackRock is 'carbon neutral today in our own operations'. It’s a claim open to challenge. 'If a company or individual says to me they are net-zero, I know it is complete crap,' tweeted Glen Peters, research director of the Oslo-based Centre for International Climate Research.

FTSE indices soared as the Biden Bounce met vaccine euphoria, underpinned by the Bank of England’s announcement of another £150 billion injection of quantitative easing. It was heartening to see shares in airlines, hotels and Rolls-Royce, the aero engine maker, perking up — and hardly surprising to see lockdown winners such as Ocado and Just Eat among the fallers. Across the Atlantic, even mighty Amazon shed 5 per cent on Monday. But stock markets are one thing and real life is another. What matters in the short term is whether Boris Johnson can get us out of the lockdown he clearly didn’t want before the tide of redundancies, heading towards 150,000 a month, crushes the prospects for a consumer-led recovery, even after vaccine distribution has begun.

Cripes. At this rate the CBI will be putting out reports on Brexit's potential benefits, George Osborne will be reminding us he could always see its upside, and even the FT will be running leaders saying Brexit doesn’t quite mean the end of the world. There have been plenty of twists and turns in our tortured departure from the European Union but few quite so unexpected as the apparent conversion of the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney to the cause. In a speech yesterday, Carney didn't opt for any of the apocalyptic stuff – no food on the shelves at Tesco, pensioners dying in hospitals because of a shortage of medicines, slight delays at the Tuscany airports – but instead he took a more measured, reasonable approach.

It's safe to say that Mervyn King,  former Bank of England governor, does not quite agree with Mark Carney on Brexit. In an incendiary article for Bloomberg, he says that the sight of Boris and Blair uniting against the deal shows  that "something has gone badly wrong". How wrong? Here's his argument. "The withdrawal agreement is less a carefully crafted diplomatic compromise and more the result of incompetence of a high order. I have friends who are passionate Remainers and others who are passionate Leavers. None of them believe this deal makes any sense. It is time to think again, and the first step is to reject a deal that is the worst of all worlds.

The headlines will inevitably write themselves. The Bank of England backs Theresa May. The Prime Minister's beleaguered and precarious deal is the best of all the options available and the economy may well get through the next few months largely unscathed. Following the testimony this morning from the Bank’s governor Mark Carney, most people will pick up on the support he has given to the Prime Minister and his reassurance that the economy will survive our departure. And yet there were two more significant points that emerged from his testimony. The Bank is finally willing to concede that leaving without a deal wouldn’t be so bad after all. And just at the moment when not leaving at all has become a real possibility, the Bank has given up on it.

‘There has to be a level playing field so that… Amazon cannot undercut domestic booksellers by using the tax advantage of booking in Luxembourg a sale to a UK customer that is fulfilled from a UK warehouse.’ I wrote that five years ago: since then, no government anywhere has effectively addressed the issue of global tax minimisation by online giants and multinational consumer brands. As Amazon’s merchandise range has expanded, it has gone on undercutting not just our last surviving bookshops but every other business-rate-burdened local retailer. Meanwhile, as its market capitalisation soars towards $900 billion, its founder Jeff Bezos has become the richest man ever, with a $150 billion hoard. And now we learn that Amazon paid just £1.

If Ben Broadbent’s Daily Telegraph interview last week was the launch of a bid for the governorship of the Bank of England, then it spectacularly misfired. The deputy governor’s use of ‘-menopausal’ to describe an economy past its productive peak — damned by the Guardian as ‘un-abashed misogyny’ even though his awkward metaphor, on closer inspection, was also about loss of male potency — has significantly lengthened the odds on Broadbent succeeding Mark Carney in June next year. Indeed, even though he has the golden qualification of a decade at Goldman Sachs, I hear he’s no longer the favourite even among the four current deputy governors and their immediate predecessors.

It is really worth bothering with Mark Carney’s upgrading of the Bank of England’s growth forecast for 2018 from 1.5 per cent to 1.7 per cent? Carney, you might just remember, warned before the EU referendum that the UK would most likely suffer a technical recession if Britain voted to leave. Even in August of that year, six weeks after the vote, when it was already clear that the economy was not diving into the abyss, he was predicting a sharp slowdown. Growth in 2017, he suggested, would come out at 0.8 per cent. In the event it was 1.8 per cent. We have seen enough forecasts over the past couple of years to realise that Michael Gove was absolutely right when he said during the Leave campaign that the country has had enough of economic experts who try to foretell the future.