With all the self-flagellation about free speech these last few weeks most people seem to have missed ASB’s record net profit – $1.18 billion. (Net profit means profit AFTER the ASB has done all its dodgy dealings to limit its tax liabilities here – the real profit is much higher).
Across the big four Australian banks we are now seeing annual profits in excess of $3 billion – meaning close to $1000 per year on average sucked from every person in this country.
The banks and neo-liberal politicians would have us believe we are lucky to have such profitable banks because it reflects a stable, strong economy but this is trying to put a fig leaf on a deeply embarrassing reality.
The simple fact is these four, private, Australian-owned banks are acting as a cartel to maintain massive profits gouged from customers rather than competing to reduce the costs to those who bank with them.
They have an effective monopoly on creating credit to extend to homeowners, farmers and businesses and use a business model designed to swindle as much cash as possible for their greedy, self-entitled shareholders.
Competition between them is a joke. Changing banks is too much of a headache for any sane person to contemplate and the banks know it. Their banking practices are based on it.
It’s a wholesale rip-off. The Sopranos have nothing on these vicious thieves.
We desperately need much tighter regulation of banking in New Zealand so customers become king rather than indolent shareholders and bloated managers.
Without much better regulation when the next crash comes these same parasites will demand New Zealanders taxpayers bail them out – and both Labour and National will do so because we will be told they are “too big to fail”.
Remember the 2010 bailout of the wealthy shareholders in South Canterbury Finance? – $1.7 billion from the taxpayer pockets to the pockets of the rich.
The same will happen again and again until we have these banks under control.
The Dodd-Frank act in the US is supposed to make it unnecessary for govt bailout in the event of a repeat of the GFC 2008. The banks would seize deposits instead. There is an insurance fund to call on in the US to ease the situation for depositors that does not exist in NZ. So but buy bank savings next time.
But if the banks were allowed to collapse next time (deposits would disappear anyway) it would be the opportunity to clean up the whole mess. They could sit their doors, swallow our savings, and disappear for good. Then the reserve bank could re-hire the staff and nationalise them all, restoring the deposits with QE or fiat money from the reserve bank. But this fiat money should all be given individual identities like paper money notes have. Even if for the sake of the numbers needed they were numbered in groups of a thousand. They should be electronically identifiable as they move through the economy and not extinguished as they are now as a bank loan is repaid. That would kill the “money
multiplier” (see Wikipedia), and from then on we could have a sovereign currency under the control of the state to serve the public.
D J S
Has merit.
‘Lets do this’…
I am inclined to think that monies placed on demand deposit should be deemed the property of the depositor (banks at present regard these monies as their own property but offset by a debt to the depositor) and therefore not subject to lending. This would prevent the banks creating money by lending these deposits to others. The government could then create money by fiat and spend it into the economy. This governmet created money would then circulate as real money rather than “debt” money. The money supply could be controlled through taxation.
I should have attached this to above https://www.globalresearch.ca/when-your-bank-fails-dont-walk-run/5635788?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles
Well I certainly did not know that my bank savings no longer have priority for payment over bank creditors and shareholders in the event of a bank failure/fraud. Appalling.
https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/faqs/open-bank-resolution-policy-faqs
National Government changed the rules I believe, Australians are covered though by the Australian Government ?
https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/regulation-and-supervision/banks/open-bank-resolution
I’m afraid you are absolutely right, John.
Only when the NZ government takes control of the money system will anything change for the better. And the government is too weak and too cowardly to tackle the banks. So it’s business-as-usual until it all falls over.
Rosa Koire explains that our government signed us up for this way back in the ’90s. The government is aiding the banksters. It’s up to us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpw7Zhu3KiI
Quoting Why we cannot afford the rich:
Now, just think – if I’d had access to that in the edit time frame instead of it disappearing into the ether I could have edited it to be readable.
It’s this crappy interface that really puts me off commenting here.
It’s hard to be an investment banker. Just ask the Dutch ex-banker who blew the whistle on all the rituals these money greedy individuals have to endure. Take a short cut and just ask our own knighted wanker (I’ll not bother to type that again).
Ellen Brown has been trying to get traction with a good idea for a Public Banking model…imho..http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/our_story
a quote form RT commentator on FB
Libby Arndt
1 week ago
Neoliberalism is global capitalism and greed on steroids and obsessive focus on the (especially identity politics). It is not the left. The Republican Party of Trump has abandoned the morals and codes of behavior the traditional right represented, including the obligation to seek the public good. The old right and left sought to protect the intrinsic self-worth and value of human beings, if in different ways. Both parties have thrown all this overboard for naked profit and power, at home and abroad, disguising the nullity of our politics with increased mutuality hostility and omission of truth.
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