The following was originally posted on WSJ’s Real Time Economics blog.
By David Wessel
Elected politicians in many developed countries have been getting failing grades from voters for their economic management. In some cases, markets have been flunking them, too. While politicians vacillate between gridlock and paralysis, a lot is riding on the world’s unelected central bankers.
Central banks are graded, ultimately, by the economic outcomes they help achieve: How much inflation, how much growth, how stable their financial systems. But as an interim evaluation, The Wall Street Journal asked the (mostly American) economists in its regular survey to grade the performance of the men who lead the world’s major banks.
The winner, by far, was Mark Carney, the Canadian central bankers who has just been tapped to succeed Mervyn King as governor of the venerable Bank of England.
Mr. Carney’s average grade was a respectable 81. Some 68% gave him an A or a B, and only one respondent flunked him.
Mr. King, whose ten-year term ends in June 2013, didn’t do so well. His average grade was a 71, but there was substantial disagreement: 41% gave him an A or B and 17% an F.
Japan’s Masaaki Shirakawa, who is facing particularly stiff attacks from politicians in his country, did even worse: an average of 63. No one gave him an A, 25% gave him a B and 29% gave him an F.
The Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank’s Mario Draghi fell in between.
Mr. Draghi’s average was 75, and 63% of the respondents gave him an A or B; only 10% flunked him. That was significantly better than the final grade of his predecessor, Jean-Claude Trichet, who left the central bank in late 2011 amid a major flare up in the European financial crisis. In October 2011, the economist gave the ECB an average grade of 51.
Mr. Bernanke’s grades in the latest survey were similar to Mr. Draghi’s: an average of 74. He also drew As or Bs from 63% of the respondents, though he did get twice as many as A’s as his European counterpart.