IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/pmschp/978-1-137-30816-0_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Political Economy of Competition Regulation in Australia

In: Bank Behaviour and Resilience

Author

Listed:
  • Caner Bakir

    (Koc University)

Abstract

The government fully accepted 113 of 115 recommendations made by the Wallis Committee; recommendations 82 and 83 which advanced the four largest banks’ (or the majors) interests on the merger issue were not accepted by the government. One institutional aspect of this regulatory framework was the power granted to the Treasurer under the Banking Act and the Insurance Act to determine whether or not mergers among the largest financial firms can take place.1 Number 82 recommended that ‘The Trade Practices Act (TPA) should provide the only competition regulation of financial system mergers’ (Treasury, 1997: 425, emphasis added). In doing so, the Treasurer’s power over mergers under banking and insurance laws could be removed. Number 83 advocated removal of the ‘six pillars’ policy — a government ban on in-market mergers between the four largest banks and two insurance companies. The ‘six pillars’ policy had prevented three different types of potential mergers: mergers among the four largest banks; mergers between the largest two insurance companies; and mergers among any of the four largest banks and the largest two insurance companies. Instead, it replaced the ‘six pillars’ policy with the ‘four pillars’ policy, which continued to block mergers among the major banks while allowing mergers between any one of the big banks and the two big insurance companies.

Suggested Citation

  • Caner Bakir, 2013. "The Political Economy of Competition Regulation in Australia," Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions, in: Bank Behaviour and Resilience, chapter 5, pages 135-157, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:pmschp:978-1-137-30816-0_5
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137308160_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:pmschp:978-1-137-30816-0_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.