The Australian Bank's Over-Alliance on Offshore Wholesale Funding

A team of IMF economists in 2006 published a report where they identified that key weakness in the Australian banking system. That is the bank's over-alliance on offshore wholesale funding. The Reserve Bank had to discuss this matter with the Bureau of Statistics and say, I think you better find a way of actually publishing another table which shows which parts of the overseas borrowing have foreign currency risk. And so we then had a new statistical collection which demonstrated conclusively what we all knew was the case.