경제위기와의 관련성을 고려해서 본 ‘금융산업의 구조개선에 관한 법률’의 타당성에 관한 고찰

In financial economics, a financial institution is an institution that provides financial services for its clients or members. Probably the most important financing service provided by financial institutions is acting as financial intermediaries. The preponderance of theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence suggests a positive, first-order relationship between financial system's development and economic growth. Bank failures are costly to their owners, customers, and some third parties. But so are the failures of other firms. To the extent that failures reflect market forces, public policies to prevent exit harm other economic agents, such as competitors and those who will benefit from entry, including consumers of banking services. Nevertheless, bank failures are widely perceived to be more damaging to the economy because of the belief that they are more likely to spill over to other banks and beyond. Bank failures are widely perceived to have greater adverse effects on the economy and thus are considered more important than the failure of other types of business firms. In part, bank failures are viewed to be more damaging than other failures because of a fear that they may spread in domino fashion throughout the banking system, felling solvent as well as insolvent banks. Thus, the failure of an individual bank introduces the possibility of systemic risk. So almost all countries have imposed special prudential regulations on banks to prevent or mitigate such adverse effects. To design public policies that can efficiently prevent the frailty of banks to be translated into a high failure rate, it is necessary to understand the potential causes of both individual bank failure and systemic risk. Systemic risk is the risk of collapse of an entire financial system or entire market, as opposed to risk associated with any one individual entity, group or component of a system. It can be defined as “financial system instability, potentially catastrophic, caused or exacerbated by idiosyncratic events or conditions in financial intermediaries”. It refers to the risks imposed by bank-run and interconnectedness in a system or market, where the failure of a single entity or cluster of entities can cause a cascading failure, which could potentially bankrupt or bring down the entire system or market. Unlike most of the other countries, Korea and United States use different procedures, to resolve insolvent financial institutions and non-financial institutions. The Bankruptcy code divides control over non-financial institution firms among the various claimants, and a judge supervises the resolution process. By contrast, the authority acts as the receiver for an insolvent bank and has almost complete control. Even though some scholars asserted that bankruptcy codes have to deal with the financial institution's insolvency procedures(court- administered insolvency proceeding), I believe, it is proper that the procedures must be handled by financial authority. This opinion has been supported by the Korea Constitutional Court's decisions and other countries legislation such as United States and United Kingdom. Also, Act on the Structural improvement of the financial industry is well designed for preventing of systemic risk by its clauses like goals of bankruptcy, initiation of bankruptcy and stay.