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This book addresses the questions of discrimination, vulnerable consumers, and financial inclusion in the light of the emerging legal, socioeconomic, and technological challenges. New technologies – such as artificial intelligence-driven consumer credit risk assessment and Fintech platforms, the changing nature of vulnerability due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the sophistication of digital technologies, which help circumvent legal barriers and protections – necessitate the continuous study of the existing legal frameworks and measures that are capable of tackling these challenges. Organized in two major parts, the first addresses, from multiple national angles, the idea of a human rights approach to consumer law, in order to replace the mantra of economic efficiency that characterizes financial services with those of human dignity and freedom from discrimination and from debt-induced servitude. The second tackles the challenges posed by increased usage of technology in connection with financial services, which tends to solve, but also creates, additional issues for consumers in general, and for vulnerable groups in particular.
This book provides a detailed analysis of mutual fund regulations and governance in the UK from the investor protection perspective. It comprehensively describes mutual funds by their function, social utility, and legal attributes, examining the level of protection provided to retail investors under existing regulations. Mutual funds are externally managed with fund ownership separated out from their management, which carries a potential conflict of interest between the self-interests of the fund management and each fund’s investors. The book provides an in-depth analysis of this agency problem in the mutual fund industry, comparing the competing governance models in the UK and the US and ...
The trend of measuring performances is global and pervasive. We all live in quantified societies, in which performances in an ever-growing array of fields–from education to health, work to credit, justice to consumption–are assessed and governed through quantitative techniques. While the disruption brought by the quantitative turn has been widely studied by social scientists, legal research on the issue is minimal. This book aims to fill the gap. The essays herein collected explore how performance measurements interact with the law in different regions and sectors, which legal effects they produce, and for whose benefit.
This book brings together experts from different fields and with different jurisdictional focuses to provide fresh ideas and deep insights into crypto regulation. Cryptoassets engage many different areas of law, with their own specific terminologies, uncertainties, and regulatory fragmentation. Unsurprisingly, then, crypto has faced calls for new laws, for reform of existing laws, and in some instances outright banning. Against this backdrop, this collection explores different aspects of crypto regulation, with reference to current developments, such as the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, and technological innovations, including central bank digital currencies, smart contracts, and non-fungible tokens. Market, user and law-/policy-maker perspectives are examined to explore not only innovation and opportunities, but also regulatory and policy challenges. This volume will be a key resource for scholars and practitioners of law, finance, public policy, criminology and economics. It was originally published as a special issue of Law and Financial Markets Review.
There is little literature on the development of banking regulation in Nigeria, or the scope of powers of the Central Bank of Nigeria, which is its core banking sector regulator. The critical impetus of this book is to contribute to the literature of this area, with a detailed exploration of the Nigerian regulatory architecture. In addition, the book also engages in a comparative analysis with two emerging economies in Africa: South Africa and Kenya. It also considers the UK and the US as comparator jurisdictions in light of their regulatory responses to the global financial crisis of 2008. This book contributes to the ongoing discourse in this area by exploring, in detail, the theoretical u...
The European Sovereign Debt Crisis: Breaking the Vicious Circle between Sovereigns and Banks explains why the euro area’s progress towards reining in the risks arising from the well-documented bi-directional financial contagion transmission mechanism that links sovereigns to commercial banks has been more prominent compared to the channel of contagion moving from banks to sovereigns. Providing an analysis of the legal and regulatory measures that Europe and the euro area have taken to mitigate the exposure of sovereigns to financial crises generated by commercial banks, this book draws attention to areas where improvements to the arsenal of tools hitherto introduced are either desirable or necessary. Chapters further explain – with recourse to economic and legal arguments – why the channel of contagion moving from sovereigns to commercial banks has proven harder to close, and explores ways in which progress could be made in the direction of closing it so as to avert the risk of future banking sector crises. This work provides essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in sovereign debt crises and the euro-area banking system.
The book shows that self-help in commercial law is a fast, inexpensive and efficient alternative to court enforcement. Self-help remedies and private debt collection are largely but not exclusively features of common law jurisdictions, since remnants of private enforcement can still be found in contract law in civilian systems. The book argues that – despite their usefulness – self-help and private debt collection entail significant risks, especially for consumer debtors. This means that private enforcement needs to be accompanied by the introduction of tailor-made consumer-debtor protection regulation. Specific attention is given to factoring, which functions in many instances as a form of pseudo-private debt collection and which has been exploited to bypass sector-specific consumer protection regulations.
Global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) are the largest, most complex and, in the event of their potential failure, most threatening banking institutions in the world. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was a turning point for G-SIBs, many of which contributed to the outbreak and severity of this downturn. The unfolding of the GFC also revealed flaws and omissions in the legal framework applying to financial entities. In the context of G-SIBs, it clearly demonstrated that the legal regimes, both in the USA and in the EU, grossly ignored the specific character of these institutions and their systemic importance, complexity, and individualism. As a result of this omission, these megabanks ...
Crypto-Finance, Law and Regulation investigates whether crypto-finance will cause a paradigm shift in regulation from a centralised model to a model based on distributed consensus. This book explores the emergence of a decentralised and disintermediated crypto-market and investigates the way in which it can transform the financial markets. It examines three components of the financial market – technology, finance, and the law – and shows how their interrelationship dictates the structure of a crypto-market. It focuses on regulators’ enforcement policies and their jurisdiction over crypto-finance operators and participants. The book also discusses the latest developments in crypto-finan...
This book is a compilation of thematically arranged essays that critically analyze emerging developments, issues, and perspectives in the field of comparative law, especially in the field of comparative constitutional law. The book discusses limits and challenges of comparativism, comparative aspects of arbitral awards, cross-border consumer disputes, online hate speech, authoritarian constitutions, issues related to legal transplants, the indispensability of the idea of the concept of Rechtsstaat, interdisciplinary challenges of comparative environmental law, free exercise of religions, public interest litigation, constitutional interpretation and developments, and sustainable development i...