ON AVERAGE, employees of US investment bank Citigroup enjoyed a $70,000 pay rise last year. That was despite relatively difficult conditions affecting the investment banking market.

As a pay increase goes, its whopping: more than the average gross pay of workers in Britain.

It comes at a time when so many others, in America, Britain and elsewhere, have been made unemployed as economies around the world show every sign of stalling again.

Conditions in Walsall contrast very sharply to the pay rises on Wall Street and in the City of London. Earlier this week, around 500 people, including some graduates, queued outside a soon-to-open branch of Poundland to apply for just 20 sales assistant jobs. The people of Walsall clearly want to work, but can’t.

Little wonder, then, that just a couple of weeks ago a new movement called Occupy Wall Street was created. Thousands of demonstrators turned up in Manhattan to protest against unemployment and inequality in America.

Within a month, the organisation’s reach and ideas had spread to over 1,500 other cities around the world. Britain’s national media have given significant coverage to a makeshift campsite at Paternoster Square, by St Paul’s, in the City of London, but anybody in town last Saturday will have seen about 200 protesters gathered outside a city centre Barclays branch.

The protesters are clearly targeting financial centres and organisations in the belief that they were responsible for the severity of the recent recession and the ongoing weak performance of the global economy.

As with the Arab Spring, we are getting used to popular movements gathering pace and influence very quickly because of social media. It can be hard for authorities and policymakers to respond with similar alacrity.

At the moment – well, today, anyway – the numbers of Occupy Wall Street protesters are still relatively small. What really matters is whether the idea they are promoting takes hold in the popular imagination.

From Adam Smith to Margaret Thatcher to Peter Hitchens, or any other present-day right- wing ideologue, it has long been argued that laissez-faire economics work best. Yet nothing is more free market than the West’s banking system and look what a mess that’s in. As a result, many people no longer buy the argument about the efficacy of free markets.

As well as a demand for greater fairness, other seditious ideas that might take hold include even higher taxation of banks’, or anybody else’s, excessive profits. At its most extreme, consumerism might lose its grip on the world. What would happen to corporate profits then? We could all spend less time earning the money to pay off our debts and more time doing qualitative things such as enjoying the company of family and friends. In all likelihood, though, these somewhat Utopian ideas won’t take root.

The failure of the banking system wasn’t caused simply by unfettered capitalist greed. The fundamental cause of the financial crisis was Communist China’s trillion- dollar trade surplus. This huge trade imbalance resulted in billions of dollars of that country’s foreign currency earnings sloshing about the world’s financial system, thereby distorting the price and availability of credit in the West. Had China’s authoritarian leadership permitted their consumers to buy more Western products, there would have been no credit crunch.