Banks as Secret Keepers

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Shadowy Banking is hard-to-monitor safety-net arbitrage. It substitutes innovative corporate entities and products for activities that could be performed more straightforwardly within a traditional banking firm.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 1998

Zenios and three anonymous referees made comments that greatly helped to improve this chapter. All remaining errors and omissions are our own.

2021

distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Banks are generally considered by most people to be utilities that allow for the transmission of value on a daily basis in modern society, but they also seem to create devastating events like credit crises by the manufacture of credit. How this power originated in human society is of interest. Most animals produce some degree of savings, either in caching from one season to the next or for later in one season. Often these savings are an intergenerational transfer for the initial survival of young as in some wasps, or in a later use by the same individual who produces the savings either in the same year or the next as in many birds. Caldararo has described many of these examples in an article that compares such caching to examples of human saving (Caldararo, 2009). The evolution of the bank, of institutions for organizing the savings of groups of humans has had a number of separate points of origin in history in various societies in antiquity and most recently during the Middle Ages in Europe. Why banks are seen as necessary and deserving of saving or protecting during economic crises often seems a matter of faith or dogma than of necessity. This explains why neither Bush nor Obama's advisors, nor the EU have crafted as bold actions in the present crisis as FDR took in his Bank Holiday and that regarding the Gold Standard. Similar actions are necessary as is massive employment, but attitudes towards banking prevent such measures.

The British Accounting Review, 2017

Over the past decade or so, banks have been affected by an array of shocks, which have transformed the industry. The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 coupled with the euro sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2012 and the subsequent recessions in many countries all combined to create a new macroeconomic environment with slower economic growth, low (or negative) interest rates and a new policy environment (where credit and quantitative easing and other alternative monetary policies are prevalent). All these forces have affected the performance and strategies of banks. Extensive regulatory and supervisory reforms have also taken place in order to reduce the risks in the banking and wider financial services sector (Berger, Molyneux and Wilson, 2015). In the United States, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 has introduced controls designed to reduce the likelihood of future taxpayer bailouts of major banks by limiting proprietary trading and other volatile business areas. Similar major reforms have taken place in the European Union, not least the moves to create a European Banking Union and the introduction of a Single Resolution Mechanism that became partially operational after the x Corresponding editor. * The Guest Editors would like to thank the General Editors, Professor Nathan Joseph and Professor Alan Lowe for commissioning this special issue and for providing advice and guidance throughout the process. Thanks also go to Shereen Awan at the British Accounting Review and Shona Deigman at the University of St Andrews for administrative assistance. We wish to thank the scientific committee, discussants and participants at the Contemporary Issues in Banking Conference held at the University of St Andrews in December 2015 for the useful comments and suggestions on all the papers submitted to this special issue, and to the referees for further comments and suggestions post submission. Finally, and most importantly we thank the authors of the papers included in the special issue for their valuable contributions in enhancing our understanding of contemporary issues in banking, The usual disclaimer applies.

OECD Journal: Financial Market Trends, 2010

International Journal of Finance & Banking Studies, 2023

In the modern world banks are unique. Formally, they are commercial enterprises, but in fact they have a government role, controlling all of the financial activity of the population and organizations. This article examines the roles of banks in the surveillance and pressuring of people that are not usually publicized. There is no political subtext in this article, as the situation described is typical for all countries. The fact that the majority of the examples given are from Russia and the USA simply reflects the experience of the authors. The other important thing to note is that the article describes the ongoing war of "banks against the people," and the cascade of events is accelerating with nearly every month. And the winner in these intermittent skirmishes is always the same.

Fìnansovo-kreditna dìâlʹnìstʹ: problemi teorìï ta praktiki, 2019

Bank secrecy encompasses information that becomes known to the bank in the course of dealing with a client. In order to ensure an appropriate level of trust in client-bank relations, the client must be sure that the information about him will not be disclosed to the outsiders. Thus, ensuring the confidentiality of information about the client is one of the important prerequisites for the functioning of the banking system. In addition, the information contained in the bank documents of a person enjoys legal protection as an element of natural human right to respect for private life and the secret of personal correspondence. At the same time, the regime of secrecy can be used to conceal the illicit movement of capital associated with corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, etc. Therefore, ensuring absolute secrecy of clien's can promote the development of criminal activities. Thus, in order to outline the limits of banking secrecy protection one has to weigh private and public interests: on the one scale there is a right of the bank's client for privacy, on the other-the public interest, connected, in particular, but not exclusively, with the prevention and investigation of criminal activities. However it should be born in mind that pursuing a socially significant purpose does not justify the disclosure of bank secrecy automatically and in any case; instead, other circumstances have to be taken into consideration. First, the possibility of disclosure of bank secrecy should be provided by the law. Secondly, this law must meet the requirements of legal certainty: it must be clear, understandable, unambiguous, so that the consequences of its application could be predicted. Thirdly, the person in respect of which the issue of disclosure of banking secrecy is raised must be provided with the necessary procedural guarantees that would enable this person to prevent or eliminate the arbitrariness in applying the measure at hand.