If crypto is incorporated into Australia’s financial system, we will be lucky to avoid contagious collapse
As a principal adviser to the then treasurer Wayne Swan, Jim Chalmers had a ringside seat to observe the impact of the global financial crisis on the Australian economy and financial system. We were spared the initial impact of the GFC largely because, still bearing the scars of financial disasters in the 1980s and early 1990s, Australian financial institutions had been slow to embrace the exotic derivatives that brought down their counterparts in the US and UK. That delay allowed time for vigorous fiscal stimulus (here and in China, our main export market) to stave off the long and deep recessions seen elsewhere.