be made to companies and households. if these sound like small steps for mankind, then they are giant ones for regulators. this is the first time in the bank ’ s 318 - year history that it has attempted such “ macro - prudential ” regulation. of course, it is impossible for the fpc or anyone else to eliminate mini - booms and mini - busts in credit. but the fpc can legitimately aim to head - off the maxi - booms, such as the pre - crisis one, and the maxi - busts, the like of which we are currently experiencing. that should be good for medium - term growth, by preventing a build - up of excessive leverage. and because financial booms and busts are inherently inequitable, it ought also to be good for the distribution of this growth across society. fifth, we really must do a much better job of promoting competition in financial services. the most shocking statistic is that, up until 2010, no new bank had been set up in this country for a century. we need to raise our levels of ambition when breaking down barriers to entry into banking, to ensure bank customers get a fair and efficient deal. although there is no silver bullet solution to the competition problem, i am attracted to recent proposals which would place some core banking services in the hands of a shared utility, storing customer account details. at present, this information is private which acts as a barrier to entry by new banks. it also acts as an impediment to consumers switching and searching between banks and their products. with customer information held in a network utility, like the electricity grid or railway network, banks could plug and play when offering deposits and loans to customers. the costs of entering the banking market would be lowered for new banks. and so too would the costs of searching and switching for customers, between banks and between products, rather as you might between gas or mobile phone suppliers. there is already some encouraging evidence of new entrants to the banking market. in weak moments, i think that we might even be on the cusp of a technological revolution in banking. certainly, some new firms are bringing new technologies to banking – for example, through mobile payments. others are mobilising pools of non - bank funds to finance lending directly – peer - to - peer lending, crowd - funding, invoice - financing. others still are demonstrating that a clear focus on retail banking services, delivered locally by forging long

. 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