It is now over a year since the Occupy movement commenced its journey and entered the collective conscience of the public and policymakers. One year on, what has it achieved? Some have suggested rather little, that Occupy’s voice has been loud but vague, long on problems, short on solutions. Others have argued that the fault-lines in the global financial system, which chasmed during the crisis, are essentially unaltered, that reform has failed. I wish to argue tonight that both are wrong – that Occupy’s voice has been both loud and persuasive and that policymakers have listened and are acting in ways which will close those fault-lines. In fact, I want to argue that we are in the early stages of a reformation of finance, a reformation which Occupy has helped stir. Let me start with the contribution of the Occupy movement itself. Occupy has been successful in its efforts to popularise the problems of the global financial system for one very simple reason: they are right. By this I do not just mean right in a moral sense. For sure, Occupy have touched a moral nerve in pointing to growing inequities in the allocation of wealth and incomes globally. The 99% certainly agrees. But so, more interestingly, do a high and rising share of the 1%. Yet it is the analytical, every bit as much as the moral, ground that Occupy has taken. For the hard-headed facts suggest that, at the heart of the global financial crisis, were and are problems of deep and rising inequality.
At the same time, the ballooning of trading activities was starving basic banking of resources. In consequence, the offering to bank customers became a rather different one. The humble, regional loan officer was pensioned-off, replaced by a centralised credit risk model which neither answered back nor required a pension. Branches were closed in an effort to contain costs. Banking became a transactional business, underpinned by a sales-driven, commission-focussed culture. The down-escalator Nonetheless, as long as asset prices were rising, the cheap credit strategy seemed to be working like a dream. For those who had borrowed, debt was being inflated away, not by the traditional route of goods price inflation but by asset price inflation. The world was experiencing the biggest bank bubble, perhaps in its history. In 2007, that bubble burst. Asset prices and balance sheets collapsed. The dream turned into a nightmare, as asset price deflation combined with high debts to put many balance sheets underwater. As the most leveraged institutions on the planet, banks were deepest underwater. To prevent those institutions sinking without a trace, governments were forced to ride to the rescue. This support came from both governments and central banks, in both cases underpinned by the tax-payer. All in, this support to the financial sector amounted to perhaps as much as two-thirds of annual GDP in the UK and US, somewhat less (but still rising) in the euro-area. Those government transfers were not shared equally even across the financial sector, with a strong skew towards institutions deemed too-big-to-fail.