Occupy was right, says Bank of England Executive Director of Financial Stability

The protesters who occupied Wall Street and parts of London and other cities were morally and intellectually right, a senior Bank of England official said.

"Some have suggested ... that Occupy's voice has been loud but vague -- long on problems, short on solutions," Andrew Haldane, a member of the central bank's Financial Policy Committee, told an event called "Socially Useful Banking," organized by Occupy Economics, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, in London Monday night.

"Others have argued that the fault lines in the global financial system, which chasmed during the crisis, are essentially unaltered -- that reform has failed," he said.

"I wish to argue 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," said Haldane, the bank's executive director of financial stability.
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...Haldane, who oversees the City for the central bank, said Occupy acted as a lever on policymakers despite criticism that its aims were too vague. He said the protest movement was right to focus on inequality as the chief reason for the 2008 crash, following studies that showed the accumulation of huge wealth funded by debt was directly responsible for the domino-like collapse of the banking sector in 2008....

For his part, Haldane broke some interesting ground during the evening’s extended question-and-answer session. At one point, he signalled that “there was no great ideological chasm” preventing the adoption of a Financial Transaction Tax that would be “felt disproportionately” by high frequency traders and that the risk of large banks moving their headquarters out of the country was “somewhat overblown … Lots of countries now have seen the perils of having big banks on their doorstep, especially when they blow up.”

In recognising that a “new leaf” is being turned, Andy Haldane’s speech specifically mentions how Occupy has played “a key role in this fledgling financial reformation.”
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