ANZ and disclosure

ANZ's involvement in the Opes Prime "collapse" is, according to Adele Ferguson, raising eyebrows.

As usual, allegations of not informing the market when they knew of trouble are being thrown about.

ACA Capital's (A US insurance firm) monoline business had its credit rating slashed to junk bond status in December. It took Canadian bank CIBC until January 14 to reveal that it would have to write down its exposure to ACA by $US2 billion, and others, including Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, made similar announcements around the same time.

It took ANZ until February 18, or more than eight weeks after ACA's original announcement and four weeks after every other bank revealed its exposure.

This delay sent shivers up the spines of investors, who started to wonder what else was lurking in ANZ's balance sheet as well as what was going on off balance sheet, which has more than doubled to $1.73 trillion during the past three years.

Opes, short sales and market transparency

John Durie in The Oz highlights the issues that ASIC faces in dealing with matters like the Opes collapse. As Duries suggests, avoiding regulatory buck-passing is the key.

Several firms engaged in stock lending offered last year to provide information about their practices to the ASX. The ASX, in its infinite wisdom, said it did not know what it could do with the information. One interpretation: we can't make money out of knowing this, so don't tell us.