Posted on 06/21/2004 7:31:07 PM PDT by NZerFromHK
So the Labor Party has decided to go in for another bout of bank bashing. This is a sport much beloved of the loonier elements in the party and the community generally, and it always goes well in the country. Fear of "the money power" has always been rife on the Left; and farmers and populists have always believed in the idea of cheap and unlimited credit, which is being withheld from them only by the profiteering owners of banks.
It is surprising, though perhaps inevitable, that the Labor leader, Mark Latham, should have forgotten most of what he learnt when he was a serious student of economics and policy issues. His onslaught on the banks gives the impression that he has just picked up the old Labor brief, dusted it off, and run it out for the umpteenth time without having given the matter a second's serious thought.
Maybe this is to be expected in the run-up to an election, and we can trust Latham to allow his more rational side to emerge again if he should win power. After all, the Hawke and to a lesser extent the Keating governments were able to implement sensible economic policies despite the demands of their own supporters.
The banks are far from innocent. They get away with what they can - in particular their gross overcharging for the use of credit on cards (amusingly, a bank spokesman recently said that there was a very low rate of default on credit cards, the opposite of what banks say when justifying the high interest on balances owing) and for card transactions generally.
There is some justification for corporations like Qantas charging for the use of cards when they are now being charged more for them (but they have yet to provide a convenient alternative or redesigned their purchase arrangements to allow easy use of B-Pay payment for tickets). Card users have been at an advantage vis-a -vis cash payers for a long time now.
And those who can afford to pay off their card balances promptly have been having a free ride.
Most of the complaints, however, are really about the changing nature of banking - which includes the disappearance of many bank branches, and the cutback on the counter services. For those who are sophisticated, and have a home computer with internet access, banking has never been simpler. But that excludes a substantial number of low income people.
There is a good argument for saying such people should be subsidised. Thirty years or so ago, it was common for such people to receive wages in cash, to conduct most of their affairs in cash, and to rely on post offices and shopkeepers to cash social security and pension cheques.
It was for the convenience of banks, business and the government that the whole financial transactions system was shifted into direct crediting to personal account and inter-account transfers. The saving in cash-handling and security costs has been enormous. Surely the inconveniences to people who wished to use cash should have deserved compensation? As it is, the sophisticated upper income group has benefited and the unsophisticated have lost.
The one form of banking which was generally available to nearly everybody, through post offices as well as bank branches, was the old Commonwealth Savings Bank. These days post offices are so busy doing anything but provide postal services that using them is difficult; and, of course, the eagerness of the private banks to get hold of savings business led to the destruction of the central role of the CSB.
The banks have gone quite a long way to providing cheap no-frills accounts, especially to holders of health cards. As usual, the bank bashers don't care to know about this - they want services for which other people will pay. So they point to the profits of the banks. But those profits accrue for the main part to themselves in any case, through their superannuation and other financial institutions which are the main holders of bank shares.
It is too late to bring back the Commonwealth Savings Bank. A pity, since its access to schools was the main form of education in use of the financial transactions system which school children received. Now they get none until their first credit card, with often disastrous consequences. Once again the poor end up paying the highest interest rates.
I made the mistake of leaving $1,000 in an Australian bank for a few years, knowing I would eventually be back there and would want to use the money. Last year, I went back and there was less than $400 in the account. The bank and the government had basically confiscated the rest in fees and taxes.
And I don't know if you remember what happened to the Victorian State Bank... but I do.
Oh, and by the way - to call him "Mr" McGuinness accords him far too much respect IMHO. Better to call him what he is a pinko, bolshy, darling of the so-far-left-leaning- they're-in-danger-of-falling-into-the-Parramatta-River-SMH.
I thought he is quite conservative by many of his articles ;-). (We don't have any columnist that conservative here in NZ)
But if that's true, that's even better news. If a pinko Australian columnist is writing like this, imagine what a truly Australian conservative columnist will produce! ;-D
That's the bank that I had the money in. What happened to it?
BTW, what happened to the Victorian State Bank? I can't recall any substantial news article over this side for what happened...
No, Paddy McGuiness isn't a 'pinko'.
He's a froot-loop who _tends_ toward the rabid right, rather than the loony left.
In fact, you might think of him as the Herald's house right-winger .. but his grip on reality's getting looser and looser, unfortunately.
Too bad. I just thought that here we have a sensible columnist whose works you will never get to see in NZ (or Canada for that matter). Perhaps like the NYT's Bill Safire, but more authentic perhaps?
In short, it went belly-up, owing the taxpayer squillions of dollars.
In part, IIRC, it was the shoring-up of the failed Pyramid Building Society .. but it owed more to the collapse of its subsidiary, Tricontinental. From memory, Tricon's debts were nearly four times the parent bank's total assets ...
Ah yes .. for details, see a good analysis at http://fsgstudy.treasury.gov.au/content/_download/Davis_Report/rtf/24_Appendix4-2.rtf
Regards
Sadim
Greg Sheridan's the closest you'll get (see the Australian's website at www.news.com.au, or http://theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,5974632%255E25378,00.html for Sheridan's archives)
Oh, there's always Andrew Bolt from the Herald-Sun at http://heraldsun.news.com.au/sectionindex1/0,5442,dhs_andrewbolt%5ETEXT%5Eheraldsun,00.html - but he is so full of bull**** that it's hard to divorce his unqualified lunatic assertions from his more rational views.
And I refuse point blank to point to Janet Albrechtson - that venomous bitch is so repugnant to me that you'll have to search the Australian's website for her yourself.
Regards
Sadim
Thanks, although I admit safire-type centrist aren't to my taste. Are there columnists more akin to Jonah Goldberg or Mark Steyn?
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