CBA compiles a handsome half

CBA's result will be supported by its latest customer disenfranchising sleight of hand with the changes to the Comsec cash accounts (CBA compiles a handsome half, February 14). All the marketing hype focussed on how the simplification of the accounts by reducing 2 accounts to 1 and by being able to access it at a CBA branch was good for its clients. The bit it kept low key was the cost to the client of this so-called simplification. The old Comsec accounts last paid 3.25% interest on the first dollar. Under the new arrangement, interest rates are tiered, and the client needs more than $250k in the account to get 3.25% interest. Comsec clients are not fooled, CBA!!

What an absolute farce that a bank can make this much profit in these supposed difficult times for banks (CBA compiles a handsome half, February 13). Its a disgrace and a super profits tax should be imposed immediately to redistribute some of this obscene income. And impose a salary cap on the overpaid monkeys that run these organizations on the back of government guarantees and ripped off clients.

CBA should have been kept as a government bank, for many reasons. One – amongst many - is the value to the Budget of its dividend stream and tax (CBA compiles a handsome half, February 14).
Cheating flogged-off the CBA for a total of $8.1 billion. Its annual profit now exceeds $7.1 billion ($5.6 billion in 2010), with $5 billion ($4.4 billion) annually in dividends which would once have gone to the Commonwealth Budget.
CBA was profitable the entire time it was owned by the government. There is no rational basis for any suggestion that it would have been less so now. Both the undercapitalisation of CBA in Cheating's time and its flogging-off were deliberate acts of political sabotage to destroy an effective government business enterprise.
On its 2012 net profit of $7.1 billion, CBA will pay $2,736 million in tax - roughly half the $5 billion in dividends that today would have done wonders for the Commonwealth Budget. Such dividends would be IN ADDITION to the tax paid. Not only is the tax less than the dividend, that tax is less than it once was due to dividend imputation.
Tax avoidance schemes, transfer pricing, and tax havens had by 2010 also helped the big banks to substantially reduce the proportion of tax they pay. Some, such as Westpac, paid about two-thirds of the overall corporate tax rate in 2010.
Banks also benefitted from Laberal's 2010 Budget reduction of the interest withholding tax paid by Australian banks and financial institutions when they used international wholesale funding markets and offshore retail deposits.