What are you on about hawkers? The reason BankWest went belly up was because its parent company, the bank of scottland ran out of money, and couldnt keep lending billions of dollars to it every month to keep it afloat. CBA didnt get to ditch bank west customers until after it failed.
You see, comercial banks lend money by borrowing from others and then lending it out. When a credit crunch hits (like the GFC) all the banks start to panic that no one will lend to them again, so they stop lending and try and pull money back in instead to get into a safe position. (classic case with centro properties, where their loan was up and they couldnt reborrow from their bank or any other bank and went into a fire sale to pay the loan back).
Because all the banks do this you have a credit crunch and liquidity problems. Thats why the RBA slashed the cash rate to increase liquidity and save the banks (nothing to do with saving house's, that wasnt the intention).
* China is heading into a credit crunch at the moment bigger than the US one.. may see this hit in the next 12 months.
* Japan is getting ready for a credit crunch.
* The Eurozone is getting ready for a credit crunch
* America is getting read for another credit crunch too.
Any one of those could trigger the other 3 as well.. Good luck getting home loans for over priced investement property in australia when the arse falls out of this huge one thats comming.
Swiss banks have even started ringing the alarm bells now that they are very worried this is going to kick off soon..
