sanctions have all become pressure points in what used to be treated as neutral infrastructure—across multiple great-power systems.⁵ Carney names the pattern directly. Tariffs are now leverage. Financial infrastructure is coercion. Supply chains are vulnerabilities to be exploited.
And in that environment, he says, the most dangerous reflex is not aggression. It is accommodation. “There is a strong tendency…to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. Well, it won’t.”¹ This is where the speech stops being about geopolitics and starts being about behavior.
Here Carney is not describing how states act in theory. He is describing how institutions act in practice. When your factories depend on one port, when your pension funds depend on one market, when your growth depends on one clearing system, you do not confront the hand that can quietly close the valve. You soften language.
You delay decisions. You explain to yourself that this is prudence, not submission. Only then does he reach for Václav Havel. In the 1970s, Havel wrote about a greengrocer who placed a sign in his window every morning: “Workers of the world, unite.” The man did not believe the slogan.
His customers did not believe it. The sign was not propaganda. It was insurance. It said: I am not a problem.
I will perform the ritual. I will not attract attention. And because every shopkeeper on every street did the same, Havel wrote, the system held—not through violence alone, but through the quiet cooperation of people who privately knew the words were false.⁶ Carney’s line to the Davos audience was spare. “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”¹ This is where the speech becomes unsettling.
He is not accusing anyone of ideological dishonesty. He is accusing them of procedural compliance—of confusing silence with neutrality, of mistaking caution for independence. When countries condemn economic intimidation from one direction and stay silent when it comes from another, he says, “we are keeping the sign in the window.”¹ Most of the people in that room make their living managing exposure, not confronting it. Corporate risk teams call it volatility.
Governments call it realism. Boards call it fiduciary duty. But in practice, it is a long series of small decisions that trade sovereignty for predictability. For decades, Carney acknowledges, that bargain made sense.
American hegemony provided public goods: open sea lanes, stable finance, collective security. The rules were uneven, but the system delivered enough stability that middle powers could live with the hypocrisy.⁷ So they placed the sign in the window. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”¹ That era, he says, is over. Crises in finance, health, energy, and