Who benefits from electricity price spikes to $14,500/MWh, and who pays? Don’t let debates about climate change and renewables blind you to possible cases of vested interests being allowed to exploit the market and gouge the public.
Australia’s best-known finance commentator Alan Kohler was compelled to recognise the importance of the banking separation issue, by the sheer numbers of public submissions to the banking royal commission calling for Glass-Steagall.
Kohler wrote in The Australian on 3 December:
Royal Commission, Glass-Steagall, APRA/ASIC/ACCC/AUSTRAC, Banking / Finance
An Eyre Peninsula nuclear power station would be a “game changer” for South Australia, providing cheap electricity, and power for water desalination to support a new agricultural irrigation scheme.
More evidence has emerged that the APRA bail-in law passed in February does not exclude ordinary deposits from being converted into worthless shares or written off to prop up failing banks, a.k.a. bailed in, as some politicians assumed.
On the same day last week that the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) chairman Wayne Byres claimed that the banks had passed stress tests conducted by the bank regulator in 2017, the Citizens Electoral Council’s Australian Alert Service published an article by Robert Barwick entitled, “Are Australia’s Big Four banks effectively bankrupt?”
A forecast national rollout of a controversial tariff system will see many Australians paying hundreds of dollars more in electricity bills each year. The ACT power company Evoenergy has conducted the largest and most comprehensive demand management (DM) trials in Australia, and industry insiders believe a “demand tariff” now exclusively used in the ACT will inevitably be implemented nationwide.
