1st nab 2nd wbc 3rd cba where is anz, page-22

Ocker, agree I think he copped a hospital pass from Gooding ad I wouldnt be surprised to see Smith take him out

there are 2 basic problems, a) there monoline counter parties are mostly insolvent, if you look at the potential pool of monolines in the market there are not any that look to able to survive in their current form, who knows where this will lead but I suspect it might rival the Westpac write down in early 90s (but in todays dollars) , anythings possible, this leads us to the underlying bond, there I suspect a further deterioration in credit quality will upon us in a few months, the monolines are a train wreck

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aFg7Ko2yIaks

and Mike Smith knows this already, he has so played for time hoping for an improvement in the credit markets, its his only real choice if he told us who his monoline exposures were (and it can only be bad as all legacy monolines are bad news) the market would bail, if he doesn't tell us the market is going to assume the worst and bail anyway

its rock and hard place stuff

b)and then he has Opes and the others, my read here is that he got very bad advice in the first stanza , a thorough review by independent investigators reviewing thousands of emails etc smacks of CEO being misled and taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen to him again, this kind of investigation could turn up anything and IMO its a good indication of his pedigree

I dont mind him blaming rogue elements because its most probably the truth, the question for Gooding is how these rogue elements could do so much damage on his watch.

c) further deterioration in the lending market could chop h
im off at the knees from a revenue point of view, NZ looks sick and Australia is weakening

Faced with further deterioration in these elements (potentially in parallel) Smith has only one choice and that is to show some leadership and make some wholesales changes to the board and exec management

folks forget that Steve Targett was having his role expanded within the bank as late April 2006 to include Asia

its also good to check back on where the bank came from in 2004 and how much progress it made during the 4 years

http://www.anz.com.au/documents/au/investor/Roadshow100504.pdf

Its interesting to also note the growth of CDS in ANZ from 507M in 2001 to 15.4B in 2004 to 46B today