I think Americans are very verbal and Aussies are more circumspect, and that can come across as being clearer. It can also come across as abrupt and cold. Some people find me to be abrupt and cold. That's just my personal style.
As much as the banking system may not be terribly popular, it is an essential part of the economy.
Salomon Brothers, E. F. Hutton, Shearson, Lehman, Smith Barney... all these firms disappear, and the Street just rolls on.
Cash as a physical entity will virtually cease to exist, with coins and checkbooks consigned to museums. As people conduct their financial transactions on hand-held devices made secure by advanced biometrics, even tipping will be done electronically.
I have a direct way of speaking. What I do is tend to lay out everything; I tend to tell people what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it and what is success for us and what's not... without being too parochial about it, I think Aussies are more direct.
Banks should decide on dividend increases and share buybacks after receiving the results of stress tests, when they know how much capital regulators wish them to hold.
I'll be very clear about this: I'm not a fan of getting rid of Dodd-Frank.
There are elements of Dodd-Frank that clearly need to be curtailed.
The basic architecture of Dodd-Frank makes sense. At the same time, as a number of regulators and legislators have observed, the act was a complex effort that produced thousands of pages of rules.
Traditional consumer banking will come under extreme pressure as its central deposit-taking and lending functions are challenged by online savings vehicles, crowdfunding, and loan syndicating by such nontraditional competitors as insurance companies, pension and hedge funds.
The threshold question: Will banks continue to exist? The answer is yes, because society will still need the two essential functions they provide: mobilization of capital from providers to users, and facilitation of payments for goods and services.
From our perspective, just narrowly from the financial sector and from our institution, there's nothing good about Brexit.
I'm not that interested in just being around powerful people for the sake of it.
I'm married to a health-conscious American. I try to eat well, but definitely, as an Australian, you have some of the red meat, lamb, steak, barbecues as part of your culture.
Every now and then, markets behave like schoolchildren. They overreact, they run around like crazy.
You will not see, in my career, the kind of returns this industry had in 2005 and 2006 for a very simple reason - the banks were undercapitalized, and returns are a function of earnings and capital.
Bringing world leaders together as human beings rather than political machines is very important.
