The key, he thinks, is to encourage more transparency about the scale of profits, and to institute regulations that prevent profiteering.
See articleThe scale of profits reaped by big mining companies last year on the back of booming mineral prices exceeded most expectations.
Here's a little number, reported by Morrisroe, that may help suggest the scale of profits derived from sleep medications: $431,000,000.
The scale of profits at Barclays, expected to be a record £11.2bn, and the size of the payouts to 23,000 Barclays Capital (BarCap) investment bankers, prompted the Liberal Democrats this weekend to call for the big banks to be broken up.
"This is the fastest growing criminal market in the world because of the number of people who are involved, the scale of profits being generated for criminal organizations -- and because of its multifold nature," said Mr. Arlacchi, a United Nations under secretary general.
In its evidence to parliament, the regulator highlighted one PPI policy sold alongside a mortgage which cost the customer £20,838 over the loan term even though the maximum they could reclaim was £31,000, an illustration of the scale of profits involved which led banks to risk mis-selling.
That means a profit must be built into the project and anything that mitigates the scale of the profit, such as responsibility toward humankind, reduces that profit and interferes with progress toward the most important goal of the project.
"We need to find out who actually owns these so called 'public services', who benefits and profits from investment in them, what is the scale of that profit, what is the impact on workers affected by any change in ownership and whether we could do things better in a way that offers far better value for the public pound," he said.
However, it is the scale of the profits that have proved to be dependent on the rights sales that will unnerve investors".
As the scale of banks' profits provided evidence of the implicit subsidy in proprietary trading, and as luminaries from Mervyn King of the Bank of England to Stanley Fischer of the Bank of Israel urged more radical action, so Mr Volcker's ideas gained momentum.Politics played a role.
