Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday February 11, 2009
Carney maintains his rosy outlook
Even as the economic horizon darkens, the man who controls the levers behind Canada’s performance is still predicting the economy will pick itself up off the floor starting later this year and stage a strong rebound in 2010.
Nearly alone among respected forecasters, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney has said the combined efforts of Canada, the United States and other industrial nations to counteract the global recession will begin to turn things around here by late summer.
Asked yesterday by an opposition MP if the central bank was not out “on something of an optimistic limb” in its predictions, Carney told the Commons finance committee: “We don’t do optimism, we don’t do pessimism.
“We do realism at the Bank of Canada. We don’t do spin.”
Carney, 43, a former Goldman Sachs executive and finance department whiz kid, expressed full confidence in the bank’s number crunching.
It’s based on hundreds of interviews with business people, bank loans surveys and 21 economic forecasting models, he said.
Still, Carney tempered his relatively upbeat outlook by cautioning that all forecasts are “subject to an unusually high degree of uncertainty” now because of the speed and worldwide reach of the current economic downturn. (Source: Toronto Star)