Australian credit arch shakes as QBE abandons LMI (members)

Tuesday, 19 August 2014

I’m afraid the writing is on the wall now for the great Australian mortgage bubble. When nobody wants to be in the lenders mortgage insurance business you know something is up. After the recent float of Genworth’s (GMA) formerly stellar LMI business, QBE has announced a partial float of its own LMI:

QBE Insurance Group has announced plans to partially float its mortgage insurance business in 2015, even as it posted an 18 per cent drop in profits to $US392 million for the half year to June.

The insurer said its lenders mortgage insurance business, QBE LMI, which held around $1.2 billion in net tangible assets at the end of June.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.