Abstract:

Covid-19's global devastation and consequential economic turmoil has far surpassed the economic shocks of historical Black Swan events. As economies around the world try to get to grips with the full consequences of Covid-19, and the paths they should take to recover, Australia is facing its own economic crisis. In this paper, we report on the four major Australian banks, who are anonymised here. We analyse a sample of 400 customers per bank for the periods of 2019 compared to 2021. We then compare the perceptions of these customers to 50 lending officers for each bank over the same periods.