Mark Carney: A platform for innovation

Speech by Mr Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, at Innovate Finance Global Summit, London, 29 April 2019.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Introduction

A century ago, John Maynard Keynes resigned as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference over his concerns about the scale of reparations in what would become the Treaty of Versailles.

He returned home to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In that seminal work, Keynes marvelled that before the war:

"The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth- [or] adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world that fancy or information might recommend."

Such global trade and portfolio management were made possible by new technologies ranging from the telegraph to the first transatlantic cable.

Replace "telephone" with "tablet" and "tea" with "turmeric latte" and you have not the start of the Twentieth Century but of the Twenty First. The second great wave of globalisation is cresting. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is just beginning. And a new economy is emerging driven by immense changes