A central bank revolution on climate change policy parallel to the 2015 Paris Agreement on steps to limit global temperature increases in this century may be under way, to achieve the essential collective carbon neutrality goals. In 2015 Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, warned of a series of climate change-related risks to the financial sector which could result from the process of adjustment towards a lower-carbon economy. A new organisation, the Network for the Greening of the Financial System (NGFS), was announced by eight central banks and supervisors in December 2017, growing to 46 by September 2019. The world’s central banks can and should set incentives to penalise carbon polluters and support the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Empirical evidence demonstrates changing incentives are effective in changing investment behaviours.

Attacks on experts and professionals using available facts, are rising in the USA, with troubling implications for economics, for the collection of statistical data, and for the future integrity of the policymaking process. The Trump Administration is undermining fact-based decision making in a number of discreet interventions: Citizenship questions for the upcoming decennial census and in attacks on the work of an economist in the US Congressional Budget Office on healthcare costs. In Argentina from 2002 until 2015 the Kirchner government twisted the output of the official statistical agency to their own aims, publishing bogus data on inflation, GDP, and poverty. In Greece the efforts of Andreas Georgiou from 2010 to 2015 to correct the biased output on GDP and government expenditure data at the Greek Statistical Agency led a judicial persecution all the way to the Greek Supreme Court.

The 2007-2008 global financial and economic crisis precipitated a significant shift in the financial regulatory worldview (or paradigm) of political and central bank leaders from leading advanced and emerging states. With a common consensus on the required financial reforms, these actors moved swiftly to create a new organization. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) now stands at the centre of the global regulatory architecture, but it remains obscure, opaque, and closed to most external observers. The FSB needs to change as it matures to reflect its key role in global financial reform efforts.