A Sick Joke !

This banking Royal Commission has revealed blatant crime by the very banking industry that is the cornerstone of our financial system.  When a bank steals money from our wallets, is that any different from a bandit who sticks a gun in our ribs and robs us in a street holdup ?   The difference is that this guy with a gun usually gets caught and is sent to prison for a few years.  It seems unlikely that anyone in the banking fraternity is looking at a prison stretch as a result of these disclosures.

There is talk that heads may roll at both board level and in the corner suites of banking institutions, but that means the bandits walk away with their superannuation cheques and may even get a gratuity bonus to speed them on their way.   These were crimes that occurred under their control.  What happened to the notion of management responsibility  ?

These crimes were calculated - and deliberate !   The litany seems endless.  Customers were billed for services they never received and in many cases the deceased had spurious charges added to their accounts years after their death.  Financial advice was in many cases simply disastrous.  People lost both their homes and businesses and yet these corrupt advisers remained spreading their evil message year after year.  Every opportunity to hike fees and charges to inflate the bottom line was taken and the banks moved in lockstep to gouge under the guise of respectability.

What we are hearing is draconian penalties for any future malfeasance.  There are threats to impose billions in fines if any of this ever occurs again, but it looks like that those who headed the various levels where this banditry originated will  survive.   It seems like that " too big to fail " principle is being invoked.  The people who cooked up these nefarious schemes are too important to banking to be sacked and so they must get a slap on the wrist - and be reformed.   They will not be made to pay for their crimes.

This Royal Commission has also shone the light on those regulatory bodies tasked with supervising the banking industry and preventing just this sort of shenanigans.  What we are seeing in our banking industry is similar to the corruption in the world banking industry that resulted in the 2008 world recession.   The banks began bundling home mortgages into what they called " derivatives " and selling them as investment opportunities, aided by the credit checking agencies which bestowed them with triple A credit ratings.   We are still fighting off the effects of that disaster.

Those regulatory agencies failed - and they must pay a price.  In 2008 neither the credit agencies nor the banks suffered the consequences of their actions.  In fact they were bailed out with public money, and what we are seeing in this Royal Commission is one of the results of the lack of public accounting for that integrity loss.   The banks lost their fear of the regulatory agencies, which lost the will to do their jobs properly.

About time for a clean out of both parties.  We will not have honest banking until the decision makers fear the regulators - and know the consequences of an integrity breach will bring personal dismissal.