ANZ may be preparing investors for a capital raising. It is also noteworthy that ANZ and its CEO Mike Smith are taking the lead - given NAB and John Stewart took the opposite position in an interview with The Australian (and abstracted here) a couple of weeks ago.In a speech on Friday, a follow up media briefing and then an expansive interview with Business Spectator, Smith outlined his take on the ballooning liquidity crunch and its implications for Australasian banks.Probably the chief message is Smith's take on the political economy of the liquidity crunch in Australia. He appears to be arguing that not only are no more interest rate rises required in Australia to contain inflation but that last week's rate rise engineered by the Reserve Bank of Australia wasn't necessary either.The guts of the ANZ view is that organic rises in rates, generated by the elevated cost of funding for all banks, are sufficient to produce the slowdown in growth in domestic demand sought by the policy makers in government.Speaking at the Australian British Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne, Smith said: "One of the many things I believe is missing in this debate is that if we can't properly reprice lending, there is a real risk banks will ultimately be limited in the amount we are able to lend customers to buy houses or to expand their businesses.  "We saw this earlier [last] week when Macquarie became the first prime lender to say it would scale back its mortgage business as they no longer see it as having a balanced risk-reward relationship. "What bankers see, particularly following this week's rise in official interest rates, is that wholesale funding costs are continuing well above official increases.  ANZ, for example, is now paying more than 50 basis points extra for wholesale funding compared to a year ago.  "Investors now prefer short-term liquidity.  Peripheral financial intermediaries are finding it harder to obtain funding and global banks are retreating to their core markets.  "This is placing an even more significant role on the major trading banks to provide finance to facilitate the running of the economy.  "And as borrowers increasingly turn to banks to borrow, and lending books expand, there is a need for more expensive equity capital.  "These global forces are inevitably flowing through to interest rates over and above changes that may be made by the Reserve Bank.  "So there is not only a very difficult balance between what costs we absorb ourselves and what we need to pass on to customers, but there is already a very real impact on the economy from higher wholesale rates and reduced liquidity.  "The inevitable outcomes are not popular."The unpopular outcome Smith was mostly referring to doesn't seem to be the predictable grizzles over lifting the interest rate on variable rate mortgages by more than 25 basis points (a decision ANZ is yet to finalise, though Westpac added 30 basis points to mortgage rates on Friday).Rather, the unpopular outcome has to be the raising