Banking Law

Abstract

As this is the first formal review in the banking law field, it is proposed to reach a bit further back in time than is traditional and to examine the principal developments in the area in the previous two to three years. The longer time-line also makes sense from another perspective, since no current review of banking law could possibly claim to be complete without some acknowledgement of, and reference to, the global credit crisis that resulted from the confluence of a number of economic factors: the development of housing bubbles in a number of jurisdictions (particularly the United States); the relaxation of bank lending criteria (including the growth of “self-cert” and sub-prime mortgages); the weakening of mortgage underwriting practice and the increase in fraudulent underwriting; the increase in predatory lending practices; the increasing deregulation of financial markets and the development of a largely unregulated “shadow banking system” (including the growth of finance companies and other non-bank deposit-takers in New Zealand);