http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,792199,00.htmlThe numbers were far from overwhelming. Some 20,000 people on the streets of Lisbon, around 10,000 in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, a few thousand each in London's banking district and in Rome's city center. Five-thousand rallied in front of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
Taken together, though, the hundreds of anti-bank protests held in over 80 countries around the world on Saturday -- an outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States -- have been difficult to ignore. And an increasing number of politicians have launched efforts to tap into the anti-bank anger.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, vowed in a Sunday evening television interview that he was taking the protests "very seriously" and said that banks need to submit to "clear controls and transparency for all parts of the banking business."
On the eve of the protests, center-left Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel told SPIEGEL that "we have to force the banks back into their role as servants to the real economy. The correct move would be to split investment banking off from commercial banking. Every mid-sized company which needs a loan will soon run into difficulties because banks are threatened with bankruptcy as a result of bad bets on the investment banking side."