The inside story of the big banking collapses of the 1990s

During the 1980s, the state banks of South Australia and Victoria responded to deregulation by plunging head-first into the heady waters of the markets. They made spectacular misjudgments and ended up bringing down their host state Labor governments.

The gung-ho atmosphere at the time is summed up in the comments of SA State Bank boss Timothy Marcus Clark, a scion of the NSW department store family and a star east coast recruit with a brief to proverbially shake up the joint. “The train is heading north. If you don’t like it you can get off,” he told one of his senior managers in 1988.