Schutzzweck und Aufsichtseingriffe

Abstract

Protective Purpose and Intervention by Supervisory Agencies – on the Run on Bank Counters and its Prevention

The author takes the twentieth anniversary of the appearance of Wolfgang Stützel’s publication on banking policy, “Bankpolitik – heute und morgen” [Bank Policy – Today and Tomorrow] as an occasion to reappraise basic questions of police intervention in banking, divorced from the objectives and means of currently valid banking law in Germany. He isolates a protective purpose in conformity with the market economy system, namely “safeguarding the functioning of the banking system by preventing a run on the counters of all banks” and from this deduces what type of intervention would seem to be necessary and adequate to achieve that protective purpose. He discusses bank publicity, risk policy intervention and direct deposit safeguarding systems. It transpires that Stützel’s “Bankpolitik” remains today and tomorrow a key text of bank policy regulation theory. This applies in particular to his central thesis that control of conduct in banking by police regulations must start with the prime risks (largescale credits, risks of exchange [interest] rate changes).