“ I was privileged to connect with Wally Turbeville on the UNEP Inquiry on Design of a Sustainable Financial System, and at its expert workshop in New York City July, 2016. We have lost a champion in the struggle to reform today’s still-risky global financial casino. Hazel Henderson, Editor “
The progressive movement lost a shining light yesterday. Our dear friend and Demos Senior Fellow Wallace “Wally” C. Turbeville passed after a long struggle with cancer.
He was among our country’s most respected and influential thought leaders and advocates for systemic financial reform as a core element in the fight for economic and racial justice. His passing is a great loss for working people everywhere.
Wally had a 30-year career in investment banking, but in the wake of the financial crisis, he rededicated his life to reforming Wall Street. I first met him when we were colleagues at Americans for Financial Reform during the battle to create the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. As a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Wally was an essential counterweight to the anti-reform lobbyists who outnumbered us in congressional and Treasury department meetings. He also had a rare gift for helping ordinary activists understand how complex Wall Street transactions were shaping their lives. It is no overstatement to say that the financial system is safer, fairer and more transparent today because of Wally’s singular contributions to the Dodd-Frank bill and the ensuing regulations.
I recruited Wally to join Demos in 2012; he became a consultant and eventually a Senior Fellow on staff. Through influential reports and articles, Wally developed an original and powerful analysis of structural flaws in our financial system, which, he argued persuasively, lay at the root of wage stagnation, diminishing job quality, and rising inequality over the last several decades.
In 2013, Wally’s investigation into Detroit’s bankruptcy changed the public understanding of what caused the city’s financial disaster: not pension costs, as was originally claimed, but the collapse of public revenue due to the financial crisis, a sharp reduction in state revenue-sharing, and shockingly bad municipal finance deals with Wall Street banks. His blockbuster report made front page news nationwide. Wally’s research galvanized Detroit activists and turned the tide in the bankruptcy court, influencing a settlement that required Wall Street banks to take a substantial haircut when terminating several exorbitant contracts with the city.
More recently, Wally crafted a groundbreaking policy proposal, the Financial Infrastructure Exchange, which aims to powerfully leverage pension fund capital and other institutional investment into the clean energy/clean economy transformation—a proposal chosen for the Democracy Journal’s best new ideas symposium for 2016. Wally’s analytical work culminated in a major working paper, “Financial Markets and Inequalities of Income and Wealth,” soon to be released by the Levy Institute of Bard College. Most recently, filming was just underway featuring Wally and his life story and ideas in a new Harold Crooks’ documentary on finance and inequality, something of a sequel to his award-winning film The Price We Pay.
Before he passed, Wally said that Demos had given him his best years. Wally gave all of us at Demos the best of himself, too. Our beloved colleague made friends across the organization and often across lines of race, age, gender and class. He had a wicked sense of humor, marked by self-awareness and humility about his own fortunate pathway through life.
We will miss Wally so very much, but his work and his character are fixed in our minds and hearts. He changed the way we saw the world we live in, and gave us the power to envision a new one. We will carry on his dedication to create an economy in which finance serves people and the planet, not the other way around.
Among the many friends and family mourning his loss are his wife, Marianne Eggler; his children, Geoffrey and Kelsey Turbeville; and his stepson, Maximilian Gerozissis.