The Big-4 Australian banks are not big lenders to mining companies. At
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...s/news-story/a6f402d3d52ffd4db98d904fbe57c735 you can read, “According to Goldman Sachs, the big four banks’ direct exposure to the mining sector is less than 1.5 per cent of total exposure at default.”
However, as the article explains, the risk lie further down the chain – businesses and individuals whose economic well being is linked to mining.
As for asking for the views of economists, I personally doubt if there are any qualified economists in the world in the sense that there are qualified engineers, doctors, metallurgists, and the like. If you ask both a left-wing geologists and a right-wing one to give an opinion on an ore sample, you are likely to get a similar report. Even if the reports differed, and you knew that the political orientations of the two geologists were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, you would not be able to guess with reasonable certainty who wrote what report. With economists – their answers usually reflect their political leanings, and if they are chameleon-like by nature, they take on the views of those who fund them.
Economics has been called the Dismal Science – a science manqué is closer to the mark. “Manqué is an adjective always put after the noun, and in English it qualifies the noun in the sense that it never made the grade to be what the noun means. The colloquialism, “wannabe” comes close as a synonym of “manqué”, and I think it works better if it follows the noun, rather than proceeds it, as is usual in English. I added this explanation, because "manqué", although an English denizen word, is difficult to Google, because most of the results presented are written in French, and the nuance of meaning is different in French.
