[T]he speech by Sarah Breeden, head of international banks supervision, suggests a degree of sympathy with the points being made by the protesters: that time is running out to prevent catastrophic climate change and previous efforts to combat the problem have been nowhere near vigorous enough.
Breeden’s message to the financial sector was that they need to incorporate climate change into their corporate governance, their risk management analysis, their forward planning and their disclosure policies or face the prospect of losing a heck of a lot of money.
The financial markets have a term for a sudden drop in assets prices known as a Minsky moment (after the economist Hyman Minsky). Breeden said a climate Minsky moment was possible, in which losses could be as high as $20tn (£15.3tn).
