James Shipton’s fate is what happens in Australia when even modest efforts to regulate threaten the major banks, illustrating the urgent need for a public bank alternative to break the monopoly of the Big Four.
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
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?”
Talk is cheap, all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. APRA’s report on CBA’s “culture” has many stern words, the media has reported it as “scathing” and “damning”, and Treasurer Scott Morrison said he expects more CBA board and management resignations. But compared with CBA’s actual crimes and misconduct, the action APRA is taking against CBA is limper than a wet lettuce.
