Thursday, May 29, 2014

Buttonwood: Inside job


HO made these remarks in a recent speech? “Inclusive capitalism is fundamentally about delivering a basic social contract comprised of relative equality of outcomes.” Or: “Capitalism loses its sense of moderation when the belief in the power of the market enters the realm of faith.” Or this: “Market fundamentalism…contributed directly to the financial crisis and the associated erosion of social capital.” Was it François Hollande? Ed Miliband? Thomas Piketty?No, all these leftish-sounding quotes came from Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, at a conference* on inclusive capitalism on May 27th. Nor did Mr Carney’s apparent heresy stop there. He also remarked that banks operated “in a privileged heads-I-win-tails-you-lose bubble” and observed that “there was widespread rigging of benchmarks for personal gain.” And he implicitly backed Michael Lewis’s criticisms of high-frequency trading (in his book “Flash Boys”), stating that equity markets blatantly favoured “the technologically empowered over the retail investor”.In some respects Mr Carney is repeating the iconoclasm of his predecessor, Sir Mervyn King, who was also sceptical about some of the finance sector’s practices....



from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1nZThR0

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