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Should the ASX be better regulated? (Read 1146 times)
freediver
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Should the ASX be better regulated?
Apr 4th, 2008 at 4:29pm
 
The ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) is a publicly listed company that has a monopoly over stock trading in Australia. Does this create a conflict of interest?

John Howard's involvement in it's creation:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1169517549/884#884

from crikey today:

The failure of the Opes Prime group and the daily disclosures of conflicts of interest, poor administration, indifferent regulation and the overriding air of collusive secrecy, is enough justification for an inquiry into the Australian financial markets. An inquiry that should scour from top to bottom.

ASIC and the ASX have been found wanting, in the case of Tricom, the failure of the Allco Finance Group, ABC Learning ... the list runs on. Poor regulation and the abysmal disclosure of short selling and stock lending are the common denominators in all of this. The ASX is a listed company -- enough of a conflict to merit some sort of immediate regulatory change -- and some of its recent activities in the regulatory area should have brought a please explain from its regulator, ASIC, but the regulator seems to be asleep at the wheel.

If an Australian bank was to get into problems -- think Bear Stearns or Northern Rock -- or if we were to see a trading scandal like Societie Generale that threatened market stability, could we handle it?

At the moment, and looking at the way the powers that be have handled the $1.5 billion, 1200-client collapse of Opes Prime, you'd have to wonder.
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Sprintcyclist
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Re: Should the ASX be better regulated?
Reply #1 - Apr 4th, 2008 at 8:37pm
 
the ASX run a good business.
companies and people will always go broke in volatile share markets.
That is the nature of share investing.

ABC learning and ALLCO were orderley market movements. That is all any market can and should offer.
Don;t know much about Tricom.
OPES prime were fiddling their own books. As soon as this was known by ANZ (interested party) and the ASX all OPES accounts were frozen, so no more fiddling could be done.
ASX cannot monitor every account in real time, nor fully investigate every market announcement.
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Re: Should the ASX be better regulated?
Reply #2 - Apr 6th, 2008 at 9:31am
 
ASX cannot monitor every account in real time, nor fully investigate every market announcement.

i agree with you on this SC, they cannot but should be fully funded (user pays) so they can. as business likes to promote itself as the arbiter and upholder of democracy, what better way of ensuring openess and integrity than transparency and accountability. the cmc (crime and miscounduct commison) here in qld is a reasonable model to follow. except in this instance the commission could be funded with a small levy against all transfers through the asx.
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freediver
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Time for ASX, ANZ to start writing Opes cheques
Reply #3 - Apr 14th, 2008 at 5:09pm
 
from crikey:

Time for ASX, ANZ and friends to start writing Opes Prime cheques
Stephen Mayne writes:

Opes Prime creditors who still believe they are only going to get 30c in the dollar should buy The AFR today because it will cheer them up no end.

Reporter Matthew Drummond produced a cracking feature which laid bare how pathetic ASIC and the ASX were as Opes spiralled out of control over the previous few months. The killer paragraph was as follows:

An investigation by The AFR has uncovered internal Opes Prime documents in which staff recorded discussions with regulators. The documents reveal that the stockbroking firm felt "encouraged" by senior ASX market supervision staff to exploit a loophole in the rules by hiving off its $1.3 billion worth of bank debts into a company that did not need an Australian Financial Services licence and was therefore out of the regulators’ sights.

There was a whole lot more detail which leads to the obvious conclusion that the ASX is going to be sued by creditors and ASIC was also incredibly slack.

ASX shares have almost halved so far this year and today they slumped another 90c to $34.10. I reckon they are still a screaming sell because Australia’s most lucrative monopoly has buckleys chance of retaining its regulatory role, faces new competition and will get sued over Opes.

The Opes Prime creditors are facing losses of $300-$400 million but there is an emerging flock of deep-pocketed targets to chase down.

For starters, there is more than $100 million in the ASX-controlled National Guarantee Fund which was set up to plug holes when brokers collapse. Why not be efficient and hand over that cash now?

ANZ, and to a lesser extent Merrill Lynch, is the other obvious targets. Alan Kohler really turned his guns on ANZ in this Inside Business editorial yesterday which he expanded on for Business Spectator today.

ANZ is copping such a reputational shellacking that it is now trading at a large discount to its Big Four rivals. The stock slumped another 3% in morning as its market cap tumbled below $40 billion - perilously close to a three year low.

The ANZ board needs to make a quick decision to stop the bleeding. With four staff on gardening leave and emerging tales of its lenders having their own accounts with Opes, it will clearly be called upon to make good on some of the losses.

If the bank made a one-off $200 million contribution to the creditors pool – conditional on creditors agreeing to waive all future legal action, it would be a very worthwhile investment.

Under this scenario, ANZ would effectively step up and represent the creditors in pursuing recovery claims against various other parties including the Opes Prime directors and senior management, the auditors, the ASX and the various favoured clients who weren’t margin called.

The alternative is years of litigation, enormous brand damage, huge distractions for management and a much bigger final bill.
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