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Mortgage Rates Commentary

COMMENT: What is Westpac's real profit number?

Saturday 2nd of September 2023

This weekend we are again featuring the latest from Jenny Ruth's Substack column.

Westpac plays jiggery-pokery with “statutory” profit numbers

For several years I campaigned to get Westpac New Zealand to report its statutory net profit in its results press release rather than simply “cash” profits.
That was unlike the other three Australian-owned banks that dominate the NZ banking system which all provided the statutory figures.

Even so, those three competitors still tried to persuade everybody – and, unfortunately, largely succeeded – that they should pay more attention to those cash profits, arguing this number was a more accurate guage of performance.

As Massey University banking professor David Tripe says, the cash figure is a measure that doesn’t have any accounting rules specifying what it must and must not include.

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