Dear Reader,
For your reference, the three main problems with the Australian economy are:
We covered the low and declining level of the Australian economy’s economic complexity in Part 1 and the enormous amount of household debt in Part 2. We will now look at the highly concentrated banking sector.
Part 3: Concentrated banking sector
On top of the economic complexity and debt problems I went through, the Australian economy also suffers from a highly concentrated retail banking market.
When measured by the total percentage of all bank and non-bank loan book assets in a country, Australia’s Big 4 Banks (Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac, and NAB) hold a combined 93.5% of the market. This is a truly extraordinary level of concentration. When we compare it to other major developed retail banking markets we can see just how concentrated it is. The USA has 46.2% of total bank assets in the top 5 banks, China…