If you’ve ever wondered if there’s something badly wrong at the centre of Australia’s free market economy, you were right. The very mechanism of how markets allocate financial resources to business — and the core of Australian financial systems — has been malfunctioning for a long time.
The repeated failures of the monopoly Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), and the highly profitable company that runs it (ASX Ltd), are common knowledge. But only last year did the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Reserve Bank lumber into action.