Having reserved some time recently to catch up with one potentially fruitful data set, courtesy of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services and its inquiry into the "impairment of customer loans", we've gained some additional perspective on Labor's proposed royal commission. An earlier survey of this inquiry's submissions tended to reinforce past prejudices, the material for the most part the output of bitter, failed entrepreneurs. While open to buying into the stance of, say, Sydney University's Evan Jones that commercial banking is borderline racketeering and the industry's methods are stacked to ratchet profits to the benefit of the lender, there are just too many sad sack stories drowning in repetitive assertions of Commonwealth Bank malfeasance (mainly) in this collection for all these outpourings to have much appeal as evidence of systematic wrong doing.Jones, we must point out, produced some fresh and strident commentary on the impairments inquiry yesterday at Independent Australia. Jones has a long record of his own research on the topic and is bold enough to contend that "CBA is lying through its corporate teeth" - a theme this newsletter plans to appraise in coming days. Our sample of the Hansards of the hearings yields insights into the weakness of the recent political model to simply probing banking's soft spots. The transcripts of these hearings are an endorsement of the need for a more revealing method of scrutiny, such as a Royal Commission.One thing can be said for the present inquiry into loan impairments; much time has been spent on digressions and diversions by a political class out of its depth. Unlike the senators and MPs who ask the questions at a parliamentary committee, the squad of senior counsels assisting a Royal Commission would most likely have read and understood the whole of the briefing material before them. They may have even studied the source material and have the capacity to explore the secrets, if there are any.On the last note let's refer to the conclusions of The Australian's banking columnist Richard Gluyas that even a re-elected Turnbull Government will set up a banking royal commission, an assessment bound to bear the imprints of senior figures.