New Bank of England Chief Was an Unusual Choice for Canada as Well

cheap uggs OTTAWA — Mark J. Carney loves a challenge.

 Mr. Carney, the chief of Canada’s central bank, who was named the next governor of the Bank of England on Monday, contrasted the current smooth operation of Canada’s financial services and monetary system with the problems in Britain.

 “I see this as a challenge, and I’m going to where the challenge is the greatest,” he said in a news conference with Jim Flaherty, Canada’s finance minister.

The word was brought up again by Ian Lee, a professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University in Ottawa, who said that while he was surprised by the timing of the Bank of England’s announcement, he was not at all surprised that Mr. Carney was seeking a bigger challenge outside of Canada.

 “I just couldn’t see him remaining here,” Professor Lee said, “because there just aren’t enough challenges for him in Canada.” He added that Mr. Carney was “going from coasting here to dealing with a ton of challenges.”

Having spent much of a career in investment banking with Goldman Sachs, Mr. Carney was an unusual figure in the Canadian public service, which has relatively few people in crucial positions with extensive private sector experience.

Uggs for cheap online Ever since Mr. Carney was named the governor of the Bank of Canada in late 2007, a move that was also something of a surprise at the time, he has developed unusual public prominence. Photogenic and fit thanks to running, Mr. Carney is a dynamic contrast to other key financial industry players as well as most federal politicians. There has been occasional speculation that Mr. Carney would try to become prime minister by taking over the leadership of the once powerful but now struggling Liberal Party. There is no obvious evidence, however, that Mr. Carney is a Liberal or that he holds any interest in elected office.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, Canada has basked in self-congratulations over the stability of its financial institutions and its credit markets. While Mr. Carney and the Bank of Canada were key contributors to that situation, the actual regulation and supervision of banks and other financial institutions was the responsibility of other agencies that report to the Department of Finance.

 “He had a very important impact,” Professor Lee said, “but I’m not going to tell you that if it was not for Carney we would been like Europe.” Mr. Carney’s chief contribution, he added, came in taking a wide set of economic reforms Canada had adopted over 15 to 20 years and then “raising it several notches” by promoting its concepts through speeches and media interviews. During the post-2008 enmity toward banks, Professor Lee said, Mr. Carney acted as the country’s “voice of reason.”

Mr. Carney’s intellect and the personal wealth he accumulated while working at Goldman Sachs, Professor Lee said, gave him the confidence to challenge both governments and powerful private sector financial institutions.

Uggs outlet In public presentations, Mr. Carney often mixes the arcane and academic (he left Goldman at one point to obtain a doctorate in economics at Oxford) with blunt talk. Although he works closely with the current Conservative government, Mr. Carney has publicly offered remarks that were well outside of its positions. Most notably he told a television interviewer last year that the Occupy protests were an “entirely constructive” response to growing economic inequality.

More recently, Mr. Carney angered many Canadian corporate leaders after he criticized them for accumulating cash that he termed “dead money.”

Mr. Carney added: “Their job is to put money to work, and if they can’t think of what to do with it, they should give it back to their shareholders.”

While Mr. Carney’s résumé includes Harvard, where he played hockey as an undergraduate, as well as Goldman Sachs and Oxford, he comes from a relatively modest middle-class background. He was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, where his father was a schoolteacher at the time, and then moved to Edmonton, Alberta, as a child.

During his time at the bank, Mr. Carney has taken pains not to seem like a member of the country’s elite. When he agreed to participate in a weekly interview feature of The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, that is always conducted over lunch, Mr. Carney avoided the usual fancy restaurant in favor of a hamburger grill near his Ottawa neighborhood.

Within the financial sector, he has a reputation for being sharp-tongued with people who do not meet his expectations.

Mr. Carney did not make it entirely clear during his news conference in Ottawa what he had offered, other than experience, that no one in Britain did for the Bank of England job. But he did note the time he spent in England with Goldman and at Oxford and that his wife and four daughters are dual British-Canadian citizens.

Uggs for sale “I know a lot of people in the city, in the industry, in the United Kingdom,” he said. “Obviously I think I can play a constructive role in relaunching this institution with its new responsibilities.”