The good folks from Occupy Wall Street/St Paul’s/the City have rightly drawn the world’s attention to many of the worst ills of contemporary capitalism, but they have not yet mentioned one which we consider to be equally pernicious: the financial system’s almost pathological abhorrence of innovation. All over the world, writes Matthew Kiernan in the Financial Times (5 December 2011), asset owners and their investment managers are failing to demonstrate the level of innovative thinking – and action – commensurate with the gravity of the current global economic, environmental, and social conditions.
