Fisher’s Ghost is rising will anyone listen?

The only answer is for Australia Post to merge with Suncorp by acquiring all shares of Suncorp at market rates to create a publicly owned finance and insurance entity.

It should have a published charter on what the range of spreads for financing different activities would be. Consumers could choose to use the new entity knowing when they enter into loans how the bank will adjust interest rates. The other banks could match the spreads in the public charter or not; it would be up to them.

But the Consumer would have real choice.

Importantly it would provide competition in the financing of business and consumer credit as well as the housing market.

With clearly defined conditions within its charter it could resist the lobbying of rent seeking groups for low rate financing.

Importantly the publication of its spread ranges for the different loans would ensure transparency of its operation. These spreads could be adjusted but the adjustment would need to withstand public scrutiny.

Part of the public charter or legislation would require that dividends returned to public revenue could be no more than a prescribed amount. This would ensure the social profits are kept within the entity and not lead to a sovereign risk issue for general revenue.

This would ensure the entity could not be a drain on public revenues and that necessary capital for contingencies and future investment would be quarantined to be used for those purposes.

The banking issue will determine whether Wayne Swan can make the transition from a colourless back room numbers man to a reforming statesman.

There can be no doubt that his time as Treasurer will compare very favourably with Chifley and Keating. After seeing his management of the Global Financial Crisis one wonders what would have been the situation if Joseph Lyons had been able to be gracious in welcoming Edward Theodore’s return to the Treasury at the time of the Great Depression instead of spitting the dummy. Theodore was the first advocate of the Keynesian approach.

However the paradox is that the Federal ALP in the last election did not run on their economic record until the last days of the campaign.

Swan had a message that should have been told,  but the community was unaware of the significance of his achievements.