Financial gossip columns - yes, we hang out there - are aflutter with the news that the UK government might ask Mark Carney to stay on as governor of the Bank of England after his term finishes next year.
What it means: Being in charge of monetary policy (controlling the country’s money supply, basically) might not sound like the most glamourous of job roles, but in British banking circles, Mark Carney is Beyoncé. As governor of the UK’s central bank he and his staff make sure the UK’s financial system is stable and prices don’t swing up and down too wildly.
Central bank governors, like politicians, are only supposed to hold the job for a set number of years (unlike politicians, they’re not elected or meant to take sides in any political argument). But some people think Carney has done such an awesome job that the government should rehire him. That’s partly because they think it’ll be a lot harder for a newbie to keep the economy stable if it encounters a lot of changes during Brexit, which is scheduled for March 2019.
Others think electing a central bank governor for the new, not-in-the-EU Britain should be as simple as ABC: Anyone But Carney. Jacob Rees-Mogg and other Brexiteers have complained that Carney acts as a double-agent for Project Fear by making over-gloomy predictions about the post-Brexit economy.
