Treasury has now joined the central bank and bank regulator in urging the private banks to reopen the floodgates on mortgage lending to avert a housing bubble crash.
The Australian reported on 3 January that Treasurer Josh Frydenberg “has called on the banks to reignite ‘affordable and timely’ lending after new figures revealed national house prices suffered their worst year since the global financial crisis.”
The Reserve Bank of Australia won’t admit they are contemplating a mega-crash, but that’s what it means when they publicly announce they have the option of Quantitative Easing (QE)—money-printing.
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?”
Former economic adviser to Australia’s coalition parties, John Adams, has continued to sound his warning of “economic Armageddon”, in news.com.au on 18 June.
Click here to read “Six pathways to Australia’s ‘economic Armageddon’”.
