Ken Henry, secretary of the Treasury, told a business lunch yesterday that Treasury was not concerned by the degree of concentration in the Australian lending market at the moment as a result of the drying up of the securitisation market,
The Australian reported.
Henry told the Australian Business Economists lunch that he did not expect the current problems in the world financial markets to be sustained.
"My own view is that we will see a renewed interest at some stage in securitised products and that there will be a return of the level of competition that many of us have gotten quite used to," he said.
Segments of the finance industry are lobbying the bureaucracy and the federal government to support schemes that would foster liquidity in the debt market for mortgage-backed securities.
Christopher Joye (of Rismark, a niche mortgage funder) and Joshua Gans (of the University of Melbourne) two months ago proposed a model based on North American schemes that they dubbed AussieMac.
The Australian Securitisation Forum is promoting a scheme that more closely follows the Canadian model.