The deposit insurance scheme

Bernard Hickey has found some very disturbing problems with the deposit insurance scheme the Government has announced:

We now have a scheme that Rod Petricevic could (in theory) use to launch new government-guaranteed finance company to repurchase loans from the receivers for Bridgecorp. It could also be used by Doug Somers-Edgar to fire up the Money Managers empire again. Allan Hawkins could start raising money for his Budget Loans finance company and promise that it was backed by the government.

Not good. The problem with rushed solutions where the driving factor is being able to announce it in time for your political campaign launch, instead of have we got the policy right.

Every finance company wannabe will be licking their licks. They’ll be working on schemes and dreams about new developments or buying bankrupt holes in the ground as we speak. Just imgaine. They will be able to offer deposits at 10% with a government guarantee. If they’re quick enough they’ll be able to do their business before the two years runs out and leave an even bigger smoking hole in the ground for the government (ie the taxpayer) to clean up.

One hopes this would not happen, but often solutions cause worse problems than the one they were tring to solve.

The second big truck sized gap in the scheme explicitly rules out bank deposits in other banks as being covered by the scheme.

This effectively means inter-bank lending is not covered. Why is this important? Currently more than a third of New Zealand bank lending is funded from international wholesale markets, which means our banks have borrowed from other banks overseas.

The scheme announced in Australia yesterday does provide a government guarantee for these inter-bank loans.  There is now a big risk that foreign banks will see they can be guaranteed if they pull their money out of New Zealand banks and put them into Australian banks.

Hopefully others will look beyond the press release and look at the details of how it might work.