Chinese Commercial Banks To Publish Their Information

Information disclosure of commercial bank has been a key issue to improve the market economic mechanism, to strengthen banking market discipline and to upgrade financial transparency, as well as a major concern of bank regulators, depositors, investors and other stakeholders. For decades, the information disclosure of China's commercial bank has been unsound, due to insufficiently disclosed information and non-standardization of the disclosure in terms of content, manner and procedure. Especially, in currently difference circumstances of the banking industry, banking information screening has been a key root causing the financial risk.Hence, this paper focuses on information disclosure of China's commercial bank. It commences with a glance at the history and present situation of China's commercial bank information disclosure and a research on its economic and jurisprudential basis. It then investigates on the commercial bank information disclosure standard system, disclosure principles, information quality standards, contents and form of the information to be disclosed, and further improvement of the disclosure. The paper adopts synthetic approaches, which consist of normative and empirical studies, induction and deduction, static anddynamic analyses, supply / demand and equilibrium analyses.This paper commences with the evolution of information disclosure of China's commercial banks and identifies the various roles that played during the evolution including the first public listed joint-stock commercial bank, China Securities Regulatory Commission, the People's Bank of China and the professional organizations in the community. It then points out the three key features of the existing information disclosure: being inconsistency of the accounting and auditing standards, different scope of disclosure and inconsistency of regulatory policies. Five problems exposed to us are identified: insufficient information disclosure, involuntary disclosure, untimely information, fraudulent information and inoperable standards for disclosure. Consequently, I believe that the urgent action to be taken by the regulators is to establish consistent, standardized and operable standards or guidelines for information disclosure.The paper also believes that the commercial bank is a special type of public enterprise, which should continually provide timely, sufficient and constant information to its depositors, investors and other market participants, and thus enable the market participants to make decision in respect of the bank's business activities, financial position and risk profiles. From the economies' viewpoint, for the purpose of improvingvmarket efficiency, the government should issue laws and regulations to ask the commercial bank to disclose fair information by the theory of efficient marketing hypothesis. And according to the theory of public-goods hypothesis, the information of the commercial banks is public goods that depositors or other stakeholders should have equal opportunity to acquire. Whilst under the law of supply and demand, commercial bank information disclosure remains stable on the point where information supply equals to information demand, or it moves if otherwise. Furthermore, from jurisprudence view the legal basis of bank information disclosure is openness, fairness, justice and efficiency.The paper believes that the standardization of China's commercial bank information disclosure should refer to the conventions of international bank information disclosure standard system. The Company Law, the Law of Commercial Banks and the Accounting Law should remain the yardstick used by the regulators to establish three-tier information standard systems, which include Management of Commercial Bank Information Disclosure, Standard of Commercial Bank Information Disclosure and Guideline on Commercial Bank Information Disclosure. The State Council and the China Banking Regulatory Commission should be the principle makers of the aforesaidregulations respectively.The paper deems that by Chin...