BFCSA: Another Michael West classic expose: Either man invents time travel or CBA is up to its old tricks:
Either man invents time travel or CBA is up to its old tricks
https://www.michaelwest.com.au/either-man-invents-time-travel-or-cba-is-up-to-its-old-tricks/
Surely not another Commonwealth Bank scam: surely not on top of Austrac, Libor rigging, Comminsure and Financial Services Boiler Room Inc. Surely, they are not gaming the regulators by switching customers out of investment property into “owner-occupied” homes.
The Twitter feed published below shows an investor, Bobo, asking the bank if he can switch his three investment properties into owner-occupied homes with just one phone call.
“Hi Bobo, you should be able to do this all on the one call,” tweets the friendly operator. Unless, however, Bobo has the transcendental skills to credibly claim that he can live in three seperate houses at the same time – or Bobo is perhaps at the vanguard of quantum physics and has devised the means to exist simultaneously in three different states – then this “switching” from investor to owner-occupied status would seem to be a very dubious caper indeed.
There are other explanations. Perhaps the Commbank tweet operator has got it wrong. And if so, we stand ready to amend this story. Or it could be that Bobo’s three investment properties are in the same block and he has knocked down a couple of adjoining walls.
There is other evidence however that suggests the banks might be pulling a swiftie. In order to protect the property market from unreasonable speculation, regulators compelled the banks to price their investment property mortgages higher than home loans in 2015.
The point of it was to “de-risk” the whole banking system. Though the latest Financial Aggregates Bulletin from the Reserve Bank clearly points out there has been a net switch of $61 billion in loans from investor status to owner-occupied status since the changes were introduced.
Royal Commission into Big Four banks is good, but the Bigger Four are lying low