Recent protests against the financial industry – the Occupy Wall Street movement, the “Indignados” in Spain and their counterparts in other European countries – can certainly lay claim to an eminent series of historical precursors.
●  Superimposed on this “structural” mistrust, one can detect cyclical patterns in the public’s attitude towards finance, affected by the conditions of financial systems and shifts in the political mood about state intervention in the economy. Until the 1970s it was taken for granted that market failures required the presence and response of a regulator to avoid suboptimal results.