  Third, credit standards, by and large, have remained robust and the amount of capital wasted through bad loans has remained limited. Foreign borrowing by banks Within Australia’s total foreign liabilities, the proportion accounted for by the foreign borrowing of Australian banks has increased. Virtually all this rise took place through the decade of the 1990s.
Banks accounted for a little over 20 per cent of Australia’s foreign liabilities in 1990 but, by 2001, this had risen to around 40 per cent. It has not changed much in the past decade (Graph 9). Part of this trend was the result of banks adjusting their balance sheets following financial deregulation and the growth of financial markets.