Australia: Ahead of the Regulatory Curve

Which country is most ahead of the regulatory curve these days? A couple of recent developments suggest that it might be Australia.

Datapoint One: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission seems ill-disposed towards Google's proposed merger with DoubleClick, worrying that the combined entity will have the power to crush competitors. The news comes as we learn that Yahoo, the closest thing that Google has to a competitor, came very close, recently, to unilateral surrender:

People familiar with the matter say that over the summer, Mr. Yang did actively assess one major sacred cow: the Web-search-advertising business it built up at great expense in recent years. Under the scenario discussed by top executives, Yahoo would have outsourced that search-advertising activity -- which places small text ads next to Web search results -- to either Google or Microsoft Corp., the people say. One of these people says Yahoo raised the idea with Google.

Datapoint Two: The Australian central bank is doing its best to shore up the asset-backed commercial paper market, by accepting such paper in repo transactions:

Australia's central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, has relaxed rules on collateral it will accept for short-term funding. This would enable banks to take more time to evaluate which portions of the asset-backed commercial-paper market are most affected by ailing subprime mortgages.
In doing so the Australians went beyond the Federal Reserve, which doesn't accept such paper as collateral in repo operations but did recently clarify it was willing to accept a wide variety of such paper for its lesser-used, and costlier, "discount window" loans to banks.
The Reserve Bank of Australia changes will begin Sept. 17 and in October will include residential mortgage-backed securities and Australian dollar-denominated asset-backed commercial paper. Bond yields fell sharply on the news.

This is an eminently sensible idea, and one which I hope will be copied by other central banks around the world: it helps provide liquidity to a newly-illiquid market without forcing the central bank into inflationary rate cuts.