미국의 서브프라임 위기에서 본 금융소비자 보호법제에 대한 시사점

Excessive and unappropriate lending to borrowers with low credit is regared as the direct cause of subprime crisis and economic recession. What I want to analyse in the paper is not only what has caused excessive subprime lending but also how it could spread so broadly. In paper, among possible causes which are direct or not, I suggest that U.S. laws and regulations related with financial customer protection haven’t cope with change of modern mortgage market. Asset-Backed Securitization which is widely used today has provoked mortgage lenders to lend much more money with less concern of default risk. ABS has made it possible for mortgage lenders to acquire plenty of available money and also to transfer mortgage default risk to ABS investors. Normally in the process of mortgage-backed securitization, more mortgage-backed securitization means more pays or commissions to securitization participants, so securitization has devoted to active circulation of mortgage. However, in the course of securitization, there has been criticism for intense competitions among subprime lenders which often lead to under-protection of subprime borrowers. Subprime crisis proves that subprime lenders and brokers have been engrossed in more interests or commissions at the sacrifice of borrowers. The point that many laws and regulations for protection of financial consumers are out-dated for securitization boom gives important implications to Korean laws. Therefore, this paper tries to investigate two main financial customer protection-related laws and to give some suggestions for legal improvement.