Revolt against super rich may be inevitable

IF ever there was a week in which the warnings of a coming "revolution" were sounded loud and clear, this has surely been it - and when that revolution comes it could make the French or Russian uprisings look like picnics by comparison. It will be remembered as the overthrow of the monied classes and of high finance. The warning was conveyed most directly by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a major speech to the Grandes Conferences Catholique in Brussels, which was startling in its condemnation of financial inequality. That came within hours of an almost equally damning indictment from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) in Paris.

Not that a revolution is likely to happen next week or in the immediate future. It will require a precipitating event, as most revolutions do, and that event could well be the next economic downturn and financial crisis that will follow from a short-sighted pursuit of finance for its own sake.

The issue is all about rising inequality - the yawning and widening gap between the (super) rich and (relatively) poor within countries; about the fact that there is just too much emphasis nowadays on money as a means of achieving economic growth, and about the lack of more efficient (let alone equitable) wealth distribution.