AMP and bank shares skyrocket upwards ! 

No one is going to jail as usual !

Why should we not be surprised !

The crooks are in charge

AMP and bank shares skyrocket upwards ! 

No one is going to jail as usual !

Why should we not be surprised !

The crooks are in charge

Hayne's findings shouldn't be a shock; the banking scandals were decades in the making

How did it come to this?

How did we arrive at a situation where banks and financial houses slugged dead people with fees?

Where billions have been sucked out of Australians' retirement savings by bank-run super funds profiting at their members' expense?

Where many vulnerable people were doled out credit they could never afford?

Where households live with an unprecedented debt burden fuelled by lax lending standards that inflated a risky property price bubble?

After months of exposés, the banks and regulators will now face the fallout from the Hayne royal commission's final report; but the truth is there are many culprits, and the poor conduct and culture were decades in the making.

The genesis goes back to the 1980s and 1990s when Australia shifted from a world where banks were tightly controlled and credit was rationed, to a world where credit was free and easy, and banks — embracing an aggressive sales culture — flogged products to make money.

Alongside the floating of the dollar and the dismantling of tariff walls, the deregulation of banking was one more step in the liberalisation of the economy during that era.

To be sure, there were many benefits from these reforms, which have enhanced peoples' material wellbeing and helped Australia withstand economic shocks.

Few would want to go back to the old, closed economy, or the culture of credit rationing where the bank manager's job was to say "no" most of the time.

But some of the core assumptions behind banking deregulation were deeply flawed.

In the late 1990s, I interviewed the then head of retail banking at the Commonwealth Bank about concerns staff held that they were increasingly required to push bank financial products that customers couldn't afford or didn't need, rather than deliver genuine customer service.

"But Stephen, sales and service are synonymous!" he responded, repeating the phrase like a mantra. "Sales and service are synonymous!"

Years later, scandalous behaviour at the Commonwealth Bank — where staff motivated by commission payments put peoples' money into high-risk investments and lost their life savings — provided one catalyst for the royal commission.

The bank executive's pet phrase lined up well with the prevailing political and economic philosophy of the time.

Politicians and policymakers assumed that freeing up the finance sector and unleashing "choice" and "competition" would be in the best interests of customers.

They underestimated the extent to which peoples' best interests would be forsaken by the finance sector in its pursuit of profit.

In Commissioner Kenneth Haynes's words: "Too often the answer seems to be greed — the pursuit of short-term profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty."........

Very early days to call it a fail , if Governments (Liberal now Labor soon) fail to carry out the 76 recommendations of the Royal Commission, then you could call it a fail

We must not allow time to water down the changes needed across the Banking and Finance Sector

I'm sure Labor will be only too happy to ensure they do, seeing as they had to take the legislation up 26 times to Parliament before it  succeeded in forcing the Liberals to establish it (R.C.)