As the Occupy Wall Street protests continue, public respect for the banking sector has reached a new low in the US and UK, GlobeScan tracking reveals.
The findings show that a majority of Americans (55%) now say they have little or no respect for the banking sector. Banks are even more poorly viewed in the UK, where 63% say they have little or no respect for them.
This represents a steep decline in public respect for the banks since 2005, when just 25% of Americans and 36% of Britons said they had no respect for them. And while respect for the sector has been on the decline since then, the banking crisis of 2008 seems to have accelerated the loss of public esteem.
The decline in the banking sector’s reputation is being accompanied by increasing calls for governments to step in and regulate it more closely. GlobeScan found in 2010 that two-thirds of Britons (66%) felt that there was insufficient government regulation of the banking sector – higher than in any other country polled. But nearly half of Americans (48%) also felt that banks needed to be more tightly regulated.
Finding from the GlobeScan Radar, Wave 2, 2011
This post was written by former GlobeScan Research Director, Sam Mountford.
