In any search for policies that slow growth and drive inequality, financial regulation is an obvious place to start. After all, the financial sector was Ground Zero for the worst economic crisis to hit this country since the Great Depression. As Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have documented, financial crises are terrible for growth: recoveries from them are generally slow and arduous. And while prone to causing cataclysmic wealth destruction for the economy as a whole, the financial sector has also been generating immense gains for a favored few. Financial executives and professionals account for an estimated 14 percent of the much-discussed top 1 percent of earners—and over 18 percent of the top 0.1 percent.
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