Research On Legal System Of Financial Services Consumer Rights And Interests Protection In The Post-financial Crisis Era

The interaction and balance between economic benefit and economic security run the financial legal system through. In different period and different fields, lawmakers and regulators may make different choices; Sometimes the choice may involves the balance between substantial fairness and the freedom of competition. With improper measures by driving things to their extremes, the lack of legal system and social and economic turmoil, even the whole social and economic system disorders, would take place, the financial crisis for instance. Since the early-2007, a tsunami-like financial crisis swept around the globe, which has been considered as the worst one since the Great Depression of 1930s, resulting the collapse of large financial institutions, bankruptcy of business elite, unemployment of ordinary people and, by and large, a global economic depression. In the post-crisis days, despite the slow recovery of economy, the triggering and catalyzing factors of the financial crisis have been far from elimination, while intricate contradictions remained in the global financial market, with tangling great interests involved. The lack of protection for the interests of financial consumers in most countries in various degrees caused the crisis and drove it into deterioration. In this sense, the establishment and the improvement of the protection for the interests of financial service consumers ought to be on the top agenda in the reform of global financial legal system.The thesis consists of four parts. The first part expounds the necessity and specialty of the protection of financial service consumers, and clarifies the meaning of the financial service consumer. The thesis argues that taking the specialty of protection of financial service consumers in consideration, the definition of the financial service consumer should be based on the breakthrough of confines of traditional meaning of the consumer in the objective of consuming, subject of consuming and extension of consuming. The second part of the thesis initially analyzes legal systems to protect financial service consumers in different countries, and generalize the main contents of legal system in this field ranging from low-amplitude to high-amplitude of government's interference as follow: the education of financial qualification, the measures of counter-fraud, the requirements and standards of information disclosure, nonbinding standards, mandatory requirements and the execution mechanism. In the post-crisis days, the features of legal protection for financial service consumers in many countries are characterized as the prominent idea of consumers first, the centralized authorities and responsibilities of institutions, the statute-bolstered reform, the balance between the formal fairness and empirical fairness and the emphasis of remedies to the rights and interests of financial services consumers. The third part anatomizes China's existing legal system in protecting financial service consumers. China's pertinent legal system is featured as"nationalistic, administration-led mode"which attached much weight to advocating the financial institutions in the pursuit of greater interests, leaving the protection of financial consumers in a lesser position. The fourth part proposes some feasible approaches to the melioration of China's legal system to protect financial service consumers. Namely, it is necessary to build up a upgraded idea of financial supervision, clearly define the scopes of consumers' rights and improve the remedy mechanism.