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Australia still a good place to invest
With the strongest governance of the 30 OECD countries, Australia is the best placed amongst them, said the OECD's deputy director of finance and enterprise affairs, Dr Adrian Blundell-Wignall.
"Australia is still a very good place to invest," he told delegates at the Investment and Financial Services Association's conference on the Gold Coast yesterday.
Australia's "twin peaks regulatory structure" of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission was a contributing factor in Australia's economic well-being, Blundell-Wignall said. He also commended the Reserve Bank of Australia's focus on monetary policy and "the stability of the payments system".
While saying it wasn't, admittedly, "a very high hurdle" to be better placed, he was not optimistic about the state of other economies, noting the lack of capital in Europe and the possibility of a "double dip recession" in the US.
"Australia is vertically integrated into China, and China will decouple from the West to a large extent," Blundell-Wignall said.
He was critical of the regulatory systems in place internationally as the global financial crisis hit and, in particular, cited the Basel II accord as a "major cause" of the market meltdown.
Banks freeing up capital with mortgages saw sub-prime as a "perfectly profitable thing to do", Blundell-Wignall said.
AUTHOR
Mike Taylor
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