Westpac loosens HEM for specufestors

Thursday, 7 November 2019

Westpac has flipped another card in a bid to revive its anaemic mortgage business by loosening the household expenditure benchmark it uses to assess investment borrowers.

In a notification to brokers on Wednesday, the bank said it was overhauling the formula used to determine the Household Expense Measure band for investors.

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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.