Carney will stay on for one more year

After a lengthy meeting with Prime Minister Theresa May, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has announced he will stay on as Bank of England Governor until June 2019.  This will mean he serves six years in the job, as opposed to the customary eight.  However, since he arranged an opt-out clause at the five-year point as a condition of taking the job, it represents a compromise of sorts.

Assuming TM-the-PM follows through on her intention of triggering the formal 2-year Brexit negotiations in March 2017, today's announcement means Carney will be in charge at the Bank at the time the UK actually leaves the EU.  Indeed, 2019 looks like a very interesting year for the UK all around, with Brexit, then a new Bank of England Governor to bed in, and then a general election, unless May sees an opportunity to call an earlier vote.

You wouldn't have blamed Carney if he'd cut and run: he has been under attack from all sides in recent weeks. William (Lord) Hague criticized him for keeping interest rates too low, inadvertently making it very clear why he (Hague) never served in a major economic portfolio -- higher rates would be an absolute disaster for the UK right now.  Michael Gove, one of the unsuccessful bidders for the job now held by May, wrote a diatribe in which he again accused Carney of being an "expert", which now seems to have a wholly pejorative meaning in Gove's lexicon.

And then there's Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of the more unhinged Brexiteers, who has been fiercely critical of Carney because the Governor dared to suggest that the Brexit vote might have consequences that the Bank might prudently need to prepare for.  There were rumours over the past week that if Carney were to hightail it back to Ottawa, Rees-Mogg might get the job, an appointment that would surely have set Sterling on a course towards parity with the Venezuelan bolivar.

Despite May's profession of confidence in Carney today, it's unlikely that any of these dolts will suspend their criticism of him for very long.  It's brave of him to stay, and it's frankly more than Ms May and her team deserve.