Great news, people. The Pascometer has not died, it has only shifted power outlets, re-appearing without delay at the New Daily:
If you think the banking royal commission is big, you’re wrong. It’s much bigger.
This week’s disclosure of corporate lies, deceit and greed has damaged the reputations of the big five (big four banks plus AMP).
Down the track, some third-string heads will roll and the vertical integration of the wealth management industry will be unravelled.
But they’re only the immediate headlines. The bigger story behind these early days of the royal commission is the trashing of the entire Big End of Town, of the great and the good who make up the nation’s network of ASX 200 directors, CEOs and CFOs, of the chairmen and women who reached the peak of Australian corporate culture – the top of a big five board table – only to be shown to be, at best, incompetent.
They’re meant to be the cream of the market crop. Certainly the executives and chairs are paid that way. Having a big five directorship on your CV is about as good as it gets in the NEDs (non-executive directors) Club.
If these, the masters of our little universe, could so lose the plot at institutions as important, solid and rich as the big five, what are they capable of across lesser entities?
The companies that are now the big five have been the cornerstones (yes, you can have five corners) of Australian business all my life. I’ll add the relatively young Macquarie to make a neat half-dozen. Plot the careers and connections of the men and women directors and C-suite executives of the financial big six and you pretty much have Australian capitalism.
Let’s recall what The Pascometer said when the malfeasance was telegraphed by UBS research into liar loans:
I have a “liar loan” – a mortgage based on less than absolutely factual information. I’ve pretty much always had liar loans. And I recently obtained a “liar credit card”. So what?
Given readers’ (and therefore the media’s) love of stories that combine housing and doomsday scenarios, investment bank UBS received saturation coverage with its idea that $500 billion in “liar loans” are a hanging over the Australian housing market, set to come crashing down on the economy at the first hint of trouble and damn us all to hell.
Oh, I don’t doubt that a fair proportion of mortgage applications are less than “completely factual and accurate”. On the basis of a survey (yes, yet another survey) of 907 people who said they took out a mortgage in the past year, UBS reckons 32 per cent of mortgage applications are less than totally ridgy-didge.
Mine have never been. Do you know with complete accuracy what your monthly expenses are? I don’t. Faced with another interminable form, I make a rough guess. It would not be accurate. I’m very impressed that 67 per cent of the UBS survey respondents claimed they really know – more power to them and an apparent ability to budget that eludes most of us.
…Given the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority are waving their sticks at the banks and the institutions themselves having the odd concern in the present open season on bank bashing, it is very reasonable to think there’s been a tightening of prudential standards – but the UBS crew would have you believe the opposite has happened, that standards have loosened.
I don’t believe it. And the evidence that actually exists – as opposed to anecdotes – indicates we’re far from being awash in American-style liar loans.
Marvelous contrary indication.
So, is the RC about to fade away? Probably. But I prefer to take the return of the mechanism today as a sign about itself. New Daily is an industry super fund backed Labor apologist. The Pascometer will now be able to wail in concert with Racism Rob to new heights of bias across all of its favourite topics. Thus ensuring its journalistic programming is corrupted ever more by the virus of fake news.
The contrarian implications are delicious and the out-performance of the MB Fund assured!
