En Passant

Of course, any controls we can put on the rich and powerful—to curtail their ability to soar ever higher into the stratosphere of wealth—are a good thing. These are the same people who tell us that we have to swallow austerity in order to pay their bills.

But bank scandals, corruption and crisis will not be stopped by regulation. They are built in to the system, a system rooted in the drive for ever greater profits. This is how capitalism works.

The Labor Government beat the banks with a wet lettuce for failing to pass on the full RBA rates cuts.

Instead why not tax their super profits and redistribute some their profit to the working class in the form of better social services like health and education, increases in Newstart and tax cuts for workers?

And, given you can’t trust the banks, something their actions have shown, how about regulating their interest rates and other offerings? Price controls over interest rates looks like a good start.

Get some perspective, people! Don’t you know the banks are in a parlous state and they need our sympathy and support in their hour of need? After-all, the big-four only made $24.3 billion in profit last year – which would leave barely $14 billion remaining after, say, funding the total investment in new public transport infrastructure in Australia and New Zealand made in the first decade of this century.

So here we have the most profitable banks in the world, the big 4 Australian banks with $31 billion in profits, not prepared to pass on a 0.25% overnight cash rate reduction to their customers on their home and business loans.

Soak the bastards, Treasurer. Hit them with a super profits tax, or threaten to do that.

And when they claim that that would impact on their costs of lending and would need to be recouped, threaten them with interest rate controls and mention you might set up a people’s bank. Oh, I forgot, we used to have one of them until the previous Labor Government flogged it off.

Maybe we should nationalise the banks under workers’ control instead.

Only we rank and file unionists can address the erosion of our living standards that mortgage rate rises produce. Strike for real pay increases.

So while borrowing costs did rise the Commonwealth and other Australian banks have increased their lending rates to us by more than their increased borrowing costs. They gouged us, and continue to gouge us.

$5.66 billion. That’s the obscene profit the Commonwealth Bank made last financial year. Remember back to December 2009?  The Reserve Bank of Australia raised interest rates 0.25 percent. The Commonwealth Bank raised its rates 0.37 percent. Remember back to the start of the global financial crisis?  In October 2008 the Rudd Labor Government guaranteed bank [...]

I think I get it. The banks were in crisis so various states spent lots and lots and lots of money to save them. Now the banks won’t lend to those states that saved them because their debts are too big – from saving the banks.

European Finance Ministers have put together a $1 trillion rescue package for Greece and the next possible dominoes in European capitalism’s fall – Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. Italy’s public debt, at 115% of GDP, for example, is the same level as Greece’s. This rescue package is for German and French banks to whom these countries are heavily [...]

Goldman Sachs has agreed to limit its UK partners’ pay and bonuses to 1 million pounds. That sounds about right - one million pounds into their money grubbing greedy guts.