외국환거래법상 외환건전성 규제체계의 재검토

Abstract

Small open economy system tends to be vulnerable to external shock, especially stemming from foreign exchange market disequilibrium. Malfunctioning foreign exchange market often leads to financial crisis and even deteriorates real sector of economy as a whole. That’s why FX regulators and the monetary authority have a keen interest in monitoring and sometimes intervening the foreign exchange and its related derivative markets in order to stabilize FX transactions and so capital movement. The Korean FX regulators are trying best to achieve a policy goal of strengthening prudence and soundness of their domestic financial institutions in several ways. The policy instruments that the regulators utilize include asset liability ratio of foreign currency, macro prudential stability levies, foreign currency liquidity coverage ratio, etc. Most of them are implemented after global financial crisis in 2008 and are considered to have relatively worked well in passing the financial turmoil period. This Paper aims to examine the current FX prudential regulation system in Korea, focusing on the three issues in the middle of controversy around the regulations today. However, any solutions to clear the current affairs are not provided, but rather the reasoning or logic with relevant information to be useful for tackling the issues is addressed. Three arguments dealt with in this paper are as follows: ① the Korean FX prudential regulation is unfairly suspected for not being compliant with an international code, that is OECD code of liberalization of capital movement. ② Bank levies should be interpreted as to internalize the externality of social cost which is not free for preventing future financial crisis. ③ Introducing Tobin tax as a new regulation tool could be risky at this time as uncertainty in the international financial markets grows larger and larger, and thus regulators should be cautious not to induce capital flight and sudden stop.