马上注册,结交更多好友,享用更多功能,让你轻松玩转社区。
您需要 登录 才可以下载或查看,没有帐号?FreeOZ用户注册
x
Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens says he would rather the major banks earn big profits than none at all.
The central bank governor was being quizzed by federal parliamentarians in Canberra on Friday over the last round of mortgage rate increases by the big banks.
All the major banks lifted their rates well above the Reserve Bank's 25 basis point increase, with the Commonwealth Bank almost doubling the increase.
The rate increases came at a time the banks collectively were making record profits, and rising every year.
But banks profit growth was no different from other large corporations, Mr Stevens said.
"If my choice is between banks with good profits and banks with no profits, I would choose the former every time," Mr Stevens said.
"We need to be careful not to forget the capital that is invested in these institutions."
He also said it was a reasonable presumption that several institutions were likely to raise there rates by more than the central bank's increases.
"We take that change in all the decisions we make," he said.
He also defended the banks' heavier reliance on deposit-taking to fund their lending needs, saying it was "prudent to do it".
He said since 2007, when the global financial crisis began and intensified with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, wholesale funding had become more "unstable and risky".
He said banks had "no choice" to shift their funding mix more towards deposit taking.
Asked if the big four banks were too big to fail, Mr Stevens said even the failure of a small entity could be quite disruptive if people panicked enough in a crisis.
He said banks were supervised intensively, and APRA was quite prepared on occasion to tell banks to meet the minimum requirement if it felt it was appropriate from an individual risk or systemic risk point of view.
"This is the nature of banks. It's a tricky area because banking is not just like any other business," he said.
"A bank failure, even a not so big bank, isn't just like the failure of another business, where someone else comes in, buys the assets, employs the people and everything else keeps going."
He said regulation was much more intrusive on a bank than on the average industrial company. |