, and perhaps also spillovers to professional services and other complementary industries. 4 this would help underpin the pickup in productivity growth that we are forecasting at the aggregate level. i am less confident, because i put more weight on the view that pre - crisis growth in finance sector productivity was simply unsustainable. much of the apparent growth in finance sector productivity before the crisis reflected profits on the risky lending that led to the crisis itself. indeed the way finance sector output is measured meant that the rate of bank balance sheet expansion translated directly into the measured contribution of the finance sector to productivity growth. strong pre - crisis growth in manufacturing productivity, meanwhile, was largely caused by structural changes in the sector catalysed by globalisation. increased competition from abroad, especially from china, created a more challenging climate for uk manufacturers, incentivising them to raise productivity ( often supported by significant foreign direct investment ) or scale back production. the uk manufacturing sector is now much more productive as a result – but is also smaller. looking ahead, the risks to productivity from this channel also appear to be to the downside. the tensions between the us and china have led to increased tariffs which have contributed to a slowdown in world growth and a sharp slowing in goods trade. and in the uk, brexit, on our forecast assumptions, is likely to lead to a reduction in the uk ’ s integration with the eu in goods and services trade, which appears unlikely, at least in the near term, to be offset by an equivalent increase in integration with the rest of the world. putting all this together leaves me a little more pessimistic on productivity growth than the mpc ’ s central forecast. since productivity growth is a key determinant of how fast the economy can sustainably grow – what i just described as the economy ’ s “ speed limit ” – that also means that, all else equal, i am a little more pessimistic about future gdp growth. my second lesson from the crisis was that we need to think about resilience much more broadly. reflecting that, economic policy makers now think as much about stability over the financial cycle as we do over the business cycle – a broader definition of resilience. one major response to the financial crisis was the creation of a new financial policy committee as part of the bank of england, giving it an explicit mandate to identify, monitor and take action to remove risks to the financial system. the committee ’ s goal is

. by this i do not just mean right in a moral sense. for sure, occupy have touched a moral nerve in pointing to growing inequities in the allocation of wealth and incomes globally. the 99 % certainly agrees. but so, more interestingly, do a high and rising share of the 1 %. yet it is the analytical, every bit as much as the moral, ground that occupy has taken. for the hard - headed facts suggest that, at the heart of the global financial crisis, were and are problems of deep and rising inequality. we have seen, first, inequality - induced crisis and, latterly, crisis - induced inequality. the 99 % have faced double - jeopardy. let me explain why. the up - escalator globalisation has conferred many benefits to the poorest in the world and narrowed global inequality. but it is well - known that income distributions within many advanced economies became increasingly skewed in the decades prior to the crisis. there was no single cause of this rise in inequality. longer - term structural factors, such as dispersed levels of educational attainment, were clearly a key factor. bis central bankers ’ speeches but so, too, were financial factors. james galbraith ’ s recent book on inequality and instability argues that the biggest single cause of rising levels of inequality in the us was the asset price boom which commenced in the early 1990s. this rising tide of asset prices added to aggregate wealth. but it did not lift all boats. the asset rich, in particular the owner - occupying rich, became a lot richer. meanwhile, the assetless and indebted fell further behind. in other words, the pre - crisis asset price bubble acted like a regressive tax. as raghu rajan describes in his book faultlines, the response to this inequality problem, in the us but elsewhere too, was simple and, on the face of it, brilliant. it was to make assetholders and owner - occupiers of us all. but for the majority there was one small problem : these assets had to be financed with debt. so what followed was an era of ultra - cheap credit globally – the heineken era, in which credit reached the parts of society it previously had not reached. levels of debt, in particular among households, rose pretty much exactly in line with levels of inequality. rising credit meant expanding bank balance sheets. to maintain this expansion, banks began to manufacture new financial products, slicing and dicing