The traditional business of banking comprised lending, deposit-taking and the provision of transaction services. Through the first half of the twentieth century, banking was a regulated, local, low risk business based on a customer’s credit worthiness and yielded returns based on interest.

Much has changed, but the mid-century model persists in the popular consciousness. Bank advertising draws heavily on this historical image. During the 1950s, banking had little to do with funds management, where an entity pools and invests money on behalf of customers.

The funds management sector was composed largely of superannuation and life insurance. For reasons discussed below, the reach of this sector was limited until regulatory and financial conditions changed.

In the 1970s, Australia began to deregulate its financial markets. Restrictions on bank interest rates and liability structures were removed; foreign banking was made easier to access; the Australian dollar was floated. The financial sector expanded. At the same time, growth in the size and liquidity of securities markets allowed more diverse financial products to develop.

The next critical steps were the expansion of superannuation, which shifted the responsibility for and control of provision for retirement from employers into the hands of individuals. From 1983, successive changes to the tax treatment of superannuation increased the complexity of superannuation but also established it as a vehicle for compulsory saving. These developments included the incorporation of superannuation into employment awards in 1986 and legislation in 1991 imposing tax penalties where employer contributions were not made.

With greater amounts of savings invested in superannuation funds, Australians now have a far higher exposure to capital markets and since the 1980s Australians have increasingly seen a need for financial advice.

In 2000, CBA acquired Colonial Mutual Life Assurance Ltd, which conducted life and other insurance business, and a funds management business

In 2000, NAB acquired the financial services businesses of Lend Lease, including its MLC Holdings Ltd. advice, platform and superannuation and asset management businesses.

In 2002, ANZ entered joint venture arrangements with ING Group in respect of wealth management and life insurance businesses in Australia and New Zealand, and later acquired the full business.

In 1999, Westpac founded Magnitude Group Pty Ltd. In 2008, as part of its merger with St George Bank Ltd, Westpac acquired St George’s financial advice business, which included employed advisers as well as Securitor Financial Group Ltd. In 2002, Westpac acquired all of BT Financial Group’s asset accumulation businesses.

Scandals dating back to the GFC began to shed light on the conflicts and culture in the financial advice industry.

In their submissions to the Commission, financial services entities acknowledged conduct that amounted to misconduct or conduct falling below community standards and expectations in connection with the provision of financial advice.

Clients of financial advisers or financial advice licensees being charged fees for services not provided to them is now rightly recognised to have been a large and endemic problem in the industry.

Charging for doing what you do not do is dishonest. No-one needs legal advice to tell them that.

https://financialservices.royalcommission.gov.au/Documents/interim-report/interim-report-volume-1.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

1. What are the core traditional functions of commercial banks? (1 mark)
2. How did banks generate profits prior to the 1980s, and what was their attitude to risk? (1 mark)
3. Identify two major changes which happened in the funds management sector of the Australian financial system between the 1970s and the 1990s. (1 mark)
4. How did Australia’s big-4 banks respond to these changes? (1 mark)
5. What is the main problem which arises as a result of providing financial advice and selling investment products in the same organisation? (1 mark)
6. Identify evidence of undesirable cultural change in the banking and financial services sector of the economy in the above extract. (1 mark)
7. Identify and distinguish between the roles played in the Australian banking system by APRA and ASIC. Which of these two institutions appears to have been more heavily criticised by the Royal Commission, and what is the main reason for this criticism?
8. What does it mean to say that the big-4 banks are ‘too big to fail’? Explain your answer clearly and concisely. (1 mark)
9. In what sense do the big-4 banks face a problem of moral hazard? (1 mark)

Please read case and answer the questions

The problem of developing engaging online content that serves the interests of readers, journalists, and advertisers alike has persisted since the explosion of the Web in the 1990s. Information may want to be free, but high quality journalism also wants to be compensated. Although modern media companies have learned valuable lessons about how to create high quality, profitable online content, the industry still has more to learn about how to create content better suited for the capabilities of the Web. One company, Vox Media, is hoping to develop answers to these problems and to other important challenges in online journalism. Founded in 2003, Vox Media is a digital media company that manages a set of editorial brands focusing on major content categories like sports (SB Nation), technology (The Verge),gaming (Polygon), and real estate (Curbed). Vox Media hopes to become a purely online version of media companies like Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Disney. Vox Media consists of over 300 sites, all of which are built on its proprietary Chorus digital publishing platform. For example, the SB Nation brand consists of hundreds of sites, most of which are focused on individual professional sports teams. Vox Media also launched a news and politics site under its flagship domain, Vox.com, in 2014.Vox.com plans to use the persistence of the Web and freedom from the space restrictions of traditional print media to cover the news more effectively and engagingly. In traditional print media, there are space constraints for every article, and each inch of column space is precious. Space online is more abundant, and the editorial compromises required to get the most information possible into a fixed space are no longer necessary. Vox hopes to avoid oversimplifying a complicated topic or omitting any details except the most pertinent.Not only that, but the Web makes it much easier to find older material or to search within archives. Most home pages emphasize only the newest developments. In print media, each day’s news is forgotten, as staff and management continually focus on the next day’s content. But on the Web, this doesn’t need to happen. Topics can build organically, and journalists can focus on new developments instead of repeatedly explaining the same concepts each day. In this way, the Web is “persistent” in a way that print media is not; the previous day’s content is still readily available, and the next day’s content can build on it, enriching coverage and reducing journalists’ workloads.Sites like Wikipedia use the persistence of the Web to great effect, as articles continue to build over time, retaining information that is still relevant while updating information that has become outdated. But very few online news outlets take advantage of the persistence of the Web. Vox envisions this type of approach to covering the news. In the past, many of the most important topics in the news have been troublesome for media companies because they’re distasteful, difficult to understand, and difficult to cover. If Vox reaches those lofty goals, it will likely be because of unique features like the card stack. Card stacks are modular topic resources that are updated to reflect the most recent developments in a particular area. For example, there are card stacks for Bitcoin, ISIS, and Obamacare, where each card discusses one specific element of the topic; for example, the Bitcoin card stack features cards such as “How do people get bitcoins?” and “Does Bitcoin have a security problem?” For complicated topics with a lot of jargon or subordinate topics that need to be frequently explained, card stacks are a perfect companion to relevant news articles.Highlighted text within these articles indicates when a card can better explain a phrase or a topic. Card stacks have some things in common with Wikipedia, including persistence and contemporariness.

1.How does James Bankoff, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Vox, describe Vox Media?

2.What does Bankoff say Vox Media’s approach is to digital media?

3. What does Bankoff think about the issue of trust and quality with respect to online content as it relates to Vox Media?

4.According to Bankoff, how does Vox Media intend to grow?

5.What is the difference between Vox Media and Vox (Vox.com)?

6.What does Matthew Yglesias say that he is hoping to achieve at Vox.com?

6. The following are IQ scores for some medical school students:

               120        106        121        112        114        134        140        121        168        127

Construct a 99% confidence interval for the population mean IQ score of a medical student.

7. Construct a 95% CI for σ in #6.

Review the most common causes of injury and death in children of various ages. Choose an age group (infant, toddler, preschool-aged, school-aged, adolescent), and develop a teaching plan about ways to avoid the hazards. Would you address the parent or child with your teaching plan?

• Differentiate among the professional psychology specializations (clinical, counseling, and school) in terms of philosophy, topic areas, and settings.
• Select five major events/milestones in the development of clinical psychology. Develop a chronological time line detailing the events/milestones you chose and their significance to the profession of clinical psychology.

Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner argued that, as a society, we need to expand our measure of intelligence beyond traditional tests. Describe the way each explains intelligence. Then explain how ideas presented by Sternberg and Gardner have changed school environments. Please include two sources

Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) mathematics scores of a random sample of 100 high school seniors in the state of Texas are collected, and the sample mean and standard deviation are found to be 520 and 80, respectively. Find a 95% confidence interval on the mean SAT mathematics score for seniors in the state of Texas.