Liars of high finance exposed at every turn

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Lead Editorial

19 July 2023
Vol. 25 No. 29

In his 4 March 1933 inaugural address, US President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilisation.” FDR was acknowledging the game-changing Pecora inquiry, held in the weeks prior to his inauguration, in which New York prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora had unmasked the until-then respectable titans of Wall Street as crooked “banksters”.

Currently in Australia, the money changers are under siege on multiple fronts and also preparing to flee the temple.

The Big Four bank CEOs experienced this last week appearing before the House Economics Committee chaired by Labor’s Daniel Mulino. Already reeling from the scrutiny they’ve received from the Senate inquiry into regional bank closures, which has forced Westpac and CBA to back down from their branch closure plans, if the CEOs hoped to have an easier time in front of a different committee they were disappointed. In fact, in each individual session with the CEOs, Chairman Mulino prioritised branch closures above all other issues—clearly reflecting the attention Dale Webster, Martin North, the ACP, and the Senate inquiry have drawn to this issue!

Under Mulino’s questioning, ANZ and NAB, the banks that have been most defiant of the Senate inquiry, both showed that they’re also feeling the heat. A very aggressive ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott—whose arrogance made him the only Big Four CEO not to agree to Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate’s Bank@Post deal in 2018, which is why ANZ customers who lose branches can’t even bank at post offices—was tense when he had to admit to ANZ’s appalling record of closing almost half of its branches since 2017. He then misled the hearing by claiming that he hadn’t closed any remote branches, when in fact he had closed 24 per cent of them; when this was pointed out on social media, ANZ reacted very badly and demanded the commentary be taken down! (Imagine if ANZ was able to influence the government to include discussion about banks in its proposed social media censorship bill? p. 3). Shayne Elliott’s attitude and behaviour betrayed his siege mentality.

As for NAB, Mulino’s questioning forced its management to effectively own up to their lies. In response to CEO Ross McEwan justifying branch closures on the grounds that customer visits have plunged, Mulino asked NAB for data on visits other than for deposits and withdrawals. McEwan deflected to his associate, who, staring like a rabbit in the headlights, admitted: “We don’t measure them.” Gotcha, NAB! This admission, that they have absolutely no proof to back up their claims that branch visits are declining, will be very interesting to the Senators on the branch closures inquiry.

The banks are not the only offenders. If you think of the banks like Mafia Dons, they don’t operate alone—there’s also their corrupt cops and their crooked bookkeepers. The corrupt cops are the regulators, especially ASIC, which is reeling from independent economist John Adams’ transparency crusade. Adams revealed on the ACP’s latest Citizens Insight interview that journalists have informed him they were contacted by ASIC to brief them on why “John Adams is a nutcase”; in other words, ASIC has resorted to trying to shoot the messenger. In a 17 July episode of the John Adams-Martin North Interests Of The People show, Adams exposed, from FOI documents, that ASIC chair Joe Longo sought to manipulate Parliament by using his political contacts to water down the ASIC inquiry—in contempt of the separation of powers.

As for the crooked bookkeepers, they have names: PwC, KPMG, EY, and Deloitte—the global Big Four. This week the PwC scandal spilled over onto the other three, with determined Senators now asking questions about issues the ACP was exposing four years ago!

As “old” Labor knew: “The money power is the greatest power on earth”; our fight to bring it under control is making enormous, rapid progress.

In this issue:

• Denounce Albanese’s Orwellian social media censorship law
• Documentation: the ACMA social media censorship bill and its Orwellian implications
• Part Two: Five Eyes fingerprints on Duggan’s arrest
• AUKUS is a Trojan horse for US takeover and NATO expansion
• Primacy in Asia Pacific: ASEAN or AUKUS?
• Lavrov: The brighter side of today’s upheaval
• The aftermath of ‘regime change’
• Banks condemned, by their own words!
• Can we stop the sleepwalk into war?
• ALMANAC: The rise of the BIS financial dictatorship

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