Governor of the Bank of Israel in an economic review at the Finance Committee/Knesset Speakers
MK Ohad Tal, Chairman of the Committee for Public Enterprises, on the day of the Knesset's inauguration.
The criticism of the Bank of Israel is legitimate.
The threats?
A little less/Reuven Castro
Knesset member Ohad Tal was an unknown name among religious Zionist Knesset members, even though he is the chairman of the Committee for Public Enterprises, a committee that it is doubtful whether the public and its enterprises have heard of. Very)? In Tal's case, the Bank of Israel is being threatened.
So it can be said that relative to the members of his faction (he himself is a resurgent - the National Union, but the list for the Knesset also includes Jewish representatives), Tal at least did not try to turn on the Israeli Arabs by force, did not demand Settle immediately in Gaza or, alternatively, drop an atomic bomb on it, but it is impossible without some collateral damage, so he chose to join the only body that still somehow functions in Israel's economy, stands with its finger in the dam in the face of a tsunami of credit rating downgrades and in our case - functions in a place where the government not only which failed, but actually collapsed.
The story begins with complaints from financial service providers according to which the Bank of Israel's allocation as emergency aid to businesses (following the war) was distributed through the banks only. The conditions the banks won, it was claimed, were improved in a way that did not encourage, to say the least, non-bank entities submits a tender for the disbursement of aid funds to small businesses. This position is backed by a series of complaints from various parties - not only competitors to the banks but also from those who apparently should not have a foreign interest such as the treasury officials or elected officials.
We will return to this discussion soon, but first a few words about the lack of success (or if you want to see the glass half full: the partial success only) of non-bank credit providers to take a significant bite out of the credit market in Israel.
The credit market in Israel is problematic not because of the Bank of Israel but because of the conservatism inherent in consumers and our trading method/ShutterStock
This time the customer is wrong
The Bank of Israel is accused of not encouraging competition in the field, but I must admit that as an observer from the side, sometimes it seems that, at least when it comes to information, it goes out of its way.
The bank's website and the information on it encourage competition for financial services, publish comparative tables and more.
Where is the problem?
In a conservative credit market, not only on the part of the old banks, who have a clear interest in maintaining the existing and the competition only among themselves (and not also with new players), but mainly on the part of the customers.
Perhaps it is the method that is to blame: there are places where it is not possible to manage bank accounts with a balance due, and bills are not paid on the spot but sent to the recipient of the service, which makes it easier for the client to hold a small private tender: let's say the dentist did not collect payment in cash, as is customary in Israel, but sent you the The bill is NIS 10,000. Naturally, such conduct encourages you to treat the money as a consumer product and check which of the credit service providers will sell you NIS 10,000 at the cheapest price.
Sometimes it seems to me that financial conservatism is ingrained in us even more than can be attributed to a method: we manage the account at the bank where our parents took us to open an account at the age of 16, the one that gave us a small gift for recruiting, a calendar for every month of September and a branded pen or diary...
It is true that in the age Digital We know less and less the people who handle our money, but the stantz still exists.
An Israeli customer will not rush to withdraw his account from the bank where he operates or receive external financial services, except after extreme cases.
If you conduct a poll among the customers, you will find that even the separation of the training funds and provident funds from the banks, which was intended to stimulate competition, only confused the public who liked all their financial matters concentrated under one roof (by the way, it was also easier to mortgage a training fund, for example, against discounted credit).
I want to say, the competition for the public's heart from non-bank financial service providers is progressing lazily not because of regulation but because it is very difficult to educate a conservative market for innovations: money is still an area where the parents' generation is asked, every time it needs to be consulted.
That is, conservatism is built into it.
Governor of the Bank of Israel, Prof. Amir Yaron.
How many slanders has the institution that holds all of our heads above raging financial waters had to absorb
with the finger in the dam
Now back to the match that ignited the fire of criticism of the Bank of Israel: apparently the bank made a mistake in the wording of the tender that allowed non-bank credit providers to compete for the supply of funds from the bank to the affected businesses, and in evidence: no body entered the tender, not a single shekel of the central bank's funds was transferred to those who needed it, but Only by the banks.
Indeed a reason for justified criticism (even if it is wisdom in hindsight).
Only here the extenuating circumstances of the event must be brought into the picture: businesses in the State of Israel collapsed due to the fact that the Israeli government was revealed to be a dysfunctional body, one that arrived at the event too little and too late, one that to this day fails to provide answers to the evacuated residents regarding compensation allocations, one that fails to keep its promises Spitzer to reservists, evacuees, business owners and almost everyone who trusted the word of the government in Israel.
This is not the place to analyze why all this happened (generally speaking: entrusting important areas to a bunch of incompetents lacking appropriate skills), but quite a few entities were drawn into this vacuum - capitalists who donated ceramic vests to the front line soldiers, civil entities that mobilized for immediate assistance with food and clothing , associations that operated help lines for those struggling with mental illness following the situation and other bodies that worked with great success and with heart-pounding dedication in all those spaces left by the Israeli government that in the first weeks simply ran away from the scene of the incident, lest a shred of responsibility cling to it.
The Bank of Israel was one of the first bodies to come to its senses.
What didn't they hear about themselves in the bank?
What was not said about the governor?
Only at the moment of truth it became clear that the huge foreign exchange reserves stored in the bank's basements (and for which he was criticized) were the sums required by the IDF no less than the contents of the hangars of the Air Force, for example. It also became clear that the governor, the one who had to hear from elected officials who do not know Even the multiplication table, how wrong his weighted interest policy is, was one of the first to withstand the burst.
Israeli Knesset.
Every time they want to respect those who are willing to be "elected officials" and prefer them over those who are called "gatekeepers", they open their mouths/image processing, Noam Moshkowitz
choose the gatekeepers
Even when Israel's credit rating was downgraded ("because of the war" the Prime Minister claimed, but the truth is that if it weren't for the Bank of Israel and the little hope that the civil protests gave that Israel would not become a country where there are no brakes that would have restrained the government systems, this would have happened already a year ago, regardless of the security situation ), the Bank of Israel and its performance were praised, among the reasons why the credit rating has not suffered an even harder blow in the meantime, despite the failed economic policy led by the government.
This does not mean that the Bank of Israel should stand above the law, as many of the participants in the discussion held at the Committee for Public Enterprises made clear.
It just means that no criticism should be interpreted as a threat to the bank's independence.
And here, under the auspices of the chairman of the committee, a matter-of-fact discussion turned into a dangerous overture: "As long as the Bank of Israel continues to ignore the Knesset and the regulators on the issue of competition in the financial worlds, we will be left with no choice but to take legislative steps that will force them to act in this way," MK Tal concluded.
As usual, the official (who turns out to be more responsible than the average elected official) is the enemy, the tone is threatening, since the threat in itself is more important than the execution, the criticism very quickly turns from matter-of-fact (and in this case, apparently also partially justified) to slanderous.
There is no doubt that the current Knesset greatly challenges the question of the status of officials (in the sense of gatekeepers) vis-a-vis that of elected officials.
I admit that I had opinions here and there (on the one hand: the officials are professionals who are free from populist considerations. On the other hand, the elected officials, at least on paper and as a commitment on their behalf, are supposed to represent the will of the public).
All of this is valid until the things that are said by those who are called "elected officials" (although among us, beyond the heads of the lists, the majority of the public does not really recognize their "elected officials") against the professional positions, even with the sometimes mistakes of the senior officials.
Or then we must vote with both hands for the Bank of Israel - and not for those who threaten the independence of the only body that helps the State of Israel to float even in stormy seas.
On the other hand, we must admit that Ohad Tal's method is perhaps losing, but not ineffective: here, we learned the name of a member of the Knesset that until yesterday only a few of us were aware of his existence.
More on the same topic:
Bank of Israel
credit
Gaza war