Home

A federally-registered independent political party

Follow the CEC on Facebook Follow @cecaustralia on Twitter Follow the CEC on Google +


Follow the CEC on Soundcloud












Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  5th of July 2010

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 03 9354 0544 Fax: 03 9354 0166
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Dracula’s bank

Macquarie Bank only “exists” in the realm of the “undead”, the mythological domain of Count Dracula and vampires. That’s because six months after the CEC issued a press release on 4th April, 2008, entitled “Macquarie Bank a gone bunny?”, Macquarie was gone, destroyed by the global financial meltdown following Lehman Brothers’ collapse.

You didn’t know that, because based on what you see, Macquarie is still going. But what you see is a corpse, sustained only by feeds of blood provided by the federal Treasury. According to freedom of information (FOI) documents obtained by The Age newspaper and reported on 17th May and 5th July, just hours after Lehman Brothers collapsed on 15th September, Macquarie Bank fired off the first of many panicked emails to the Federal Treasury in Canberra, begging for protection. The email was sent by Trevor Burns, one of Macquarie’s many executives who are former political operatives—Burns was the chief of staff to Howard government minister-turned Macquarie exec Warwick Smith.

The next day, 17th September, a flurry of emails flew back and forth between Macquarie and ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which is located in the same building, 1 Martin Place, as Macquarie. Within days, by 19th September, ASIC banned the short-selling in financial stocks that was blamed for crashing Macquarie’s share price. Macquarie’s share price, which had fallen to $15.75 after almost breaking $100 a year earlier, surged 9 per cent that day. However, Macquarie was able to continue its normal trading activities—activities which included short-selling the stocks of other, but non-financial, companies!

By 12th October, the federal government guaranteed bank deposits and offshore borrowings by Australian banks, including Macquarie. But this was five days after the then Financial Services Minister, Senator Nick Sherry, was the guest at a private dinner at Macquarie’s HQ in Martin Place, hosted by CEO Nicholas Moore, and attended by between “10 and 14 senior Macquarie executives”, according to FOI documents reported today in The Age; a ten-year veteran of Sen. Sherry’s personal staff, Jody Fassina, is another former political operative turned Macquarie apparatchik.

Capitalising on the guarantee, Macquarie set up a unit headed by “trusted” Packer family banker Ben Brazil, which became one of the biggest users of the guarantee, raising nearly $20 billion under the federal government’s AAA credit rating, which it would not have been able to do, and would have been at a much higher interest rate, under its own A credit rating. Even then, Macquarie rorted this mechanism, by on-lending the funds it raised cheaply to foreign companies, reportedly enraging the otherwise impotent Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan.

All of this emergency action around Macquarie contradicts Macquarie spokesman Greg Ward’s claim that Macquarie was never in danger in 2008. The Age recounted: “In early 2009, Deutsche Bank analyst Ross Brown quipped to Mr Ward at Macquarie’s earnings result: ‘If it wasn’t for government guarantees we might not be sitting here having this conversation.’” (Rumour has it, that conversation took place in a dungeon crypt, away from sunlight, garlic and crucifixes.)

The blatant and probably corrupt bailout of Macquarie Bank is powerful proof that Australia needs its own form of Glass-Steagall regulation, that fences gambling and speculating operations such as Macquarie, off from the essential functions of the banking system, and excludes them from any government protections for their parasitical activities.

To find out about the massive fight to introduce Glass-Steagall regulations across the globe, click here.

The CEC has been right about the economic crisis for over 20 years. See our record on the crisis and its solutions in our feature-length DVD, the Homeowners & Bank Protection Bill—The Only Solution. Click here for a free copy.

To buy a copy of What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression, click here.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.


We hope you found this message useful. As a registered political party‚ the CEC receives email addresses from various sources‚ which it does not pass on to any other organisation. If you would prefer not to receive further emails of this nature at your email address [[-Email-]]‚ click here to be removed.
If the link does not work‚ copy the following into the address field in your browser:
//remove/?s=[[-Email-]]

Authorised: Robert Barwick‚ 595 Sydney Rd‚ Coburg‚ Vic 3058


Citizens Electoral Council © 2016
Best viewed at 1024x768.
Please provide technical feedback to webadmin@cecaust.com.au
All electoral content is authorised by National Secretary, Craig Isherwood, 595 Sydney Rd, Coburg VIC 3058.