The Occupy movement has never wanted for celebrity backers, whether the actress Susan Sarandon or the academic Noam Chomsky. However, the protesters who camped in Wall Street and the City of London last year probably never envisaged a central banker offering support for their message.
Yet even this has now come to pass. In a speech on Monday, Andrew Haldane, a senior official at the Bank of England, expressed sympathy for Occupy’s claim that the global financial system was broken. He also praised the protesters for their analysis: at the root of the financial crisis, Mr Haldane agreed, lay problems of deep and rising inequality.
There is something to be said for such a display of freethinking by a top BoE official. Whatever one thinks of the tactics or objectives of the Occupy movement, its critique of the pre-crunch system was at least in part spot on. The rewards offered by the financial sector were excessive and encouraged its overexpansion. This not only created an unstable system that ultimately had to be rescued by taxpayers; it also caused long- term economic damage by diverting talent and funding away from research-intensive sectors. Repairing this neglect will take years.