Bank of England\'s New Leader, a Member of the \'Government Sachs\' Club

The announcement on Monday that Mark Carney will serve as the next head of the Bank of England shows that the “Government Sachs” meme isn't going anywhere.

Mr. Carney, who is the head of the Bank of Canada, is the latest government minister to have worked at Goldman Sachs earlier in his career. (He reportedly beat out a current Goldman executive, Jim O'Neill, for the position.)

Current members of that club include Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank and a former vice chairman of the firm; Mario Monti, the Italian prime minister and a former international adviser; and Gary Gensler, the head of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

And the list of Goldman alum in previous government posts is much more extensive, encompassing the likes of Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary and onetime Goldman chief executive, and Neel T. Kashkari, a top lieutenant under Mr. Paulson who helped draft the Bush administratio n's response to the 2008 financial crisis.

That's to say nothing of Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary; Stephen Friedman, the onetime chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; and Jon S. Corzine, the former senator and governor of New Jersey.

The history of Goldman employees moving into the halls of political power is well known and highly contentious. Goldman has long been regarded as one of the savviest firms on Wall Street, and a stream of former officials taking seats in financial ministries, banking regulators and elsewhere.

Detractors of the phenomenon are legion, arguing that it leads to government policies that favor banking firms at the expense of the general populace. Proponents say that it allows for more sophisticated regulations, penned and executed by people who know Wall Street inside out.

Goldman itself has sought to play down the practice. “We're proud of our alumni, but frankly, when they work in the public sec tor, their presence is more of a negative than a positive for us in terms of winning business,” a spokesman for the firm told The New York Times in 2008. “There is no mileage for them in giving Goldman Sachs the corporate equivalent of most-favored-nation status.”

It's unclear whether Mr. Carney's time at Goldman will be a burden in his new post. He spent 13 years at Goldman, working from its London, New York and Tokyo offices, serving at one point as Goldman's head of sovereign risk for Europe, Africa and the Middle East. That position included playing a role in the firm's response to Russia's fiscal crisis and South Africa's first government bond sales after the fall of apartheid.

As the head of the Bank of Canada, Mr. Carney has largely won acclaim for steering that country's central bank through the global market turmoil of 2008, avoiding the tumult that upended England's financial institutions.

“Mark Carney is a quick study and has an enviable track record in the private sector, monetary policy and regulatory issues,” Barbara Ridpath, the chief executive of the International Centre for Financial Regulation, told The Financial Times in April. “Few other ‘candidates' have all three.”