London - The leader of the worldwide Anglican church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has condemned bankers and financiers for lacking any sense of "repentance" over last year's financial crisis. Rowan Williams told the BBC that there had yet to be any reckoning for the excesses and bonus culture, and that society was becoming increasingly "dysfunctional" as the gap between rich and poor widened.
Williams also said the government should have acted to cap bonuses.
"There hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year," the archbishop said.
"There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty'."
"What we are looking at is the possibility of a society getting more and more dysfunctional if the levels of inequality that we have seen in the last couple of decades are not challenged."
Asked if the City of London was returning to "business as usual" Williams said: "I worry. I feel that's precisely what I call the 'lack of closure' coming home to roost.
"It's a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year 'idolatry', that projecting [of] reality and substance onto things that don't have them."
Williams also said that the crisis was a lesson that "economics is too important to be left to economists".
