Terry McCrann: Banking inquiry won’t turn them into saints
THE Royal Commission into banks will do nothing to change the behaviour of dodgy bankers, but it does come with a big risk for Australia, says Terry McCrann. Here’s why.
Terry McCrann
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THE Royal Commission won’t be as disastrous as the banks have tended to claim — it is not going to send foreign investors running screaming in fear from Australia.
It also won’t deliver some sort of miraculous change to banks and the way bankers behave — converting them instantly from ‘bastards’ into benevolent ‘saints’.
The actual commission will be some combination of numbingly and endlessly repetitive financial detail and endlessly repetitive individual whinges about ‘bad experiences.’
It will end up essentially telling us what we already know: that yes, banks can do things wrong; that yes, there are very real victims of bad practices or bad individual banking behaviour.
But, by and large, they have now been dealt with — both individually and in a structural way by the banks.
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Further, considering the millions of interactions between customers and banks each week, they do a pretty good job; and like with everything, we tend not to ‘notice’ when things don’t go wrong, only when they do.
I would not be holding my breath for some sort of ‘revolution’ or ‘magic wand wave’ at the end of it all.
I would be concerned that the only tangible thing we will get out of it all is yet more regulation — regulation, that has to be paid by someone and that someone is you.
The other great danger is that it will all bleed into the next election campaign — triggering a race to be ‘tougher on the bastards’.
That’s when I would start to get really worried about its impact on our standing in global financial markets.
Not because we should just kowtow to international financiers, but because we borrow tens of billions of dollars every year from them.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: Banking inquiry won’t turn them into saints