Still unreported: big bank solvency in the crash of 2008

With one piece of merger gossip from 2008 now on the public record, that leaves one task of naming and shaming from that year to complete.

Ross Garnaut and David Llewellyn-Smith in their book The Great Crash of 2008, published in October 2009, wrote as follows:

"In the early days of October 2008, money poured into the big four Australian banks from other financial institutions. But life was becoming increasingly anxious for them as well.

"One by one they advised the Australian government they were having difficulty rolling over their foreign debts. Several sought and received meetings with Prime Minister Rudd.

"The banks told him that, if the government did not guarantee their foreign debts, they would not be able to roll over the debt as it became due. Some was due immediately, so they would have to begin withdrawing credit from Australian borrowers.

"They would be insolvent sooner rather than later."

As publicity for the Garnaut and Llewellyn-Smith book promoted this claim, The Australian Bankers Association responded, in a media release at the time, that "the evidence is that the Australian banks were not insolvent and the wholesale funding guarantee was introduced as a means of ensuring banks could maintain lending growth, not to restore the solvency of banks."

Charles Goode, the former chair of the board of ANZ, is the only banker this newsletter is aware of to have rebutted this assertion. "This was not requested by the major Australian banks," Goode told the bank's 2009 AGM.

Still, Garnaut has the contacts and, one assumes, the nous to differentiate between fact and gossip.

So which big bank or banks were in the office of Wayne Swan in September or October 2008 pleading for help?