What’s gone wrong with the Committee to Save the Planet?

magazine put three heavyweights from America’s Federal Reserve and Treasury Department on its cover, calling them “The Committee to Save the World”. They were Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Their accomplishment was stopping economic upheavals from Russia to Brazil causing mayhem in the global financial system. Big stuff, for sure. But nothing compared with the task facing those who today could be called “The Committee to Save the Planet”. They are Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, Larry Fink, boss of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, and Jamie Dimon, of JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank.Their aims are no less than to stop global warming and create a fairer, more enlightened form of capitalism. In just a few years they have marshalled to the cause more than 100 central banks, tens of trillions of dollars of investors’ cash and bank finance, and the bosses of America’s biggest firms. Their ambitions are not just big. They are epochal. So why are they suddenly figures of mockery in the war on “woke” capitalism?