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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Chairman Joe’s meeting confirms bail-in ‘on track’ for Brisbane G20

Treasurer Joe Hockey recently chaired a G20 meeting which declared the progress of “bail-in” laws for G20 member nations as “on track” to be implemented by the Brisbane G20 Leaders’ Summit on 15-16 November.

Bail-in is the name for the Cyprus-style confiscation of bank deposits, or their conversion into worthless bank shares, in order to keep Too Big To Fail banks afloat in a new financial crisis.

Hockey’s chairing of this meeting gives the lie to the repeated claims from his office, in response to the Citizens Electoral Council’s campaign to expose and stop bail-in, that there is no bail-in law planned for Australia.

As the current chair of the G20 Finance Ministers, Hockey handed down a series of reports on the status of a package of financial reforms being pushed by the G20, following the G20 Finance Ministers’ and Central Bank Governors’ Meeting in Washington D.C. 10-11 April; the reports were annexed to the event’s Communiqué which Hockey released in an 11 April media statement.

The key appendix was a “Report from the FSB Chairman”, Mark Carney. The FSB—Financial Stability Board—is charged with responsibility for putting in place bail-in powers in every G20 member nation by the time of the November 2014 G20 Summit in Brisbane.

Carney’s statement read: “I reported in February on the priorities, agreed by G20 Leaders in St. Petersburg, for substantially completing the core of the G20’s programme of fundamental reform of the global financial system during the Australian Presidency. We are on-track to deliver for the Brisbane Summit…”

Carney was explicit that this “programme of fundamental reform” includes bail-in: “Your support is needed to ensure that national authorities are empowered to co-operate fully with their counterparts in other countries, including by recognising foreign resolution actions and ensuring that debt issued under foreign law includes contractual recognition provisions so that bail-in is effective in a cross-border context.”

In breaking news, Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens told a 10 June Symposium on Asian Banking and Finance in San Francisco that Australia is “highly supportive” of Mark Carney’s efforts, including his push to resolve the problem of banks being Too Big To Fail (TBTF) through bail-in: “Such [TBTF] entities are sufficiently large and interconnected that an uncontrolled failure could easily cause systemic disruption,” Stevens said in typical central banker-speak. “Therefore, it is argued that further loss-absorbing capacity is needed, to be called on at the point of non viability, so as to allow vital functions to continue and non-critical operations to be wound down in a controlled way. This limits adverse spillovers to the system and the economy. Generally, this loss-absorbing capacity is to come from a ‘bail-in’ of certain classes of private creditors [namely “unsecured creditors”, which includes depositors], so as to avoid calling on the public purse for a ‘bail-out’. This is an appealing idea, though it comes with the caveat that, to my knowledge, it has not successfully been done for a major institution to date.” [Emphasis added.]

Chairman Joe cannot continue to deny bail-in at home, when the G20 meetings he chairs, and Australia’s Reserve Bank Governor, affirm that these laws are on track; furthermore, Australian MPs must not accept any more of Hockey’s denials.

The CEC’s investigation proved that all G20 member nations have signed onto the bail-in agenda detailed in the FSB’s “Key Attributes of Effective Resolution Regimes” published in October 2011. [Click here for a graphic presentation of the evidence that bail-in is being prepared for Australia.]

The bail-in regime is most consolidated in the EU, which this year instituted a single resolution authority, under the same FSB, to impose bail-ins on EU nations, whether the national governments agree or not. A senior economist of the French Socialist Party, Jacques Attali, wrote in a May 26 L’Express column that when the next financial crisis hits Europe, taxpayer bailouts will not be possible, “Thus there will be no other solutions than to foot the bill.…” Attali wrote. “That includes the participation of the final holders of the debt, that is to say savers, who will watch their savings being plundered, not by inflation, but by a drain on their bank accounts, as in Cyprus (which the recent agreements on the Banking Union explicitly allow, and are known as ‘bail-ins,’ though few people know about it).” [Emphasis added.]

The CEC is fighting in Australia for a far better alternative to bail-in, which will solve the problem of banks being TBTF, and save deposits: split up the Big Four banks, and Macquarie, under a full Glass-Steagall banking separation.

Glass-Steagall, the 1933-1999 U.S. law that completely separated commercial banking from investment banking, protects deposits in commercial banks by forbidding those banks from participating in all forms of risky financial speculation; investment banks that do engage in financial speculation do so knowing they will sink or swim on their own—the government will not step in to stop them from failing.

To join the CEC today in demanding that your Member of Parliament oppose bail-in and support Glass-Steagall instead:


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