RSA: "Inequality: the real cause of the crisis?"

Link above to web site

"At the depth of the downturn in October 2009, St Paul’s Cathedral hosted a spirited and timely debate on the subject of the role of the growing divide in market-led economies. Sharing a platform with Nicholas Sagovsky, canon theologian at Westminster Abbey, and Vince Cable, then Lib-Dem deputy leader, Brian Griffiths, the Vice-Chair of Goldman Sachs and a former adviser to Mrs Thatcher, defended higher inequality ‘as the way to achieve greater prosperity for all’.

"For the last 30 years, the gains from growth in a number of rich countries have gone increasingly to big business and a small corporate and financial elite. Between 1980 and 2007, average real wages in the UK rose by half the rate of economic growth, a process of decoupling that accelerated from the late 1990s. In the US, living standards for four-fifths of the workforce have been little better than stagnant over the last three decades. In Germany, real wages started flat-lining from the millennium.

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The Guardian: 

"Tinkering on the economic brink"

"The mechanisms that link inequality and economic malfunction are still at work. Falling real wages are stifling demand in the world's richest economies. The globe's largest corporations are sitting on near-record volumes of cash, money that is mostly standing idle. 

"When they are spent, they are likely to finance another wave of high-margin financial and industrial restructuring, rather than the productive investment that creates robust economies. Bank assets are even larger today than they were before the crash, and the power of the City and Wall Street remains intact."