Paper's abstract

Michèle Grégoire, The Precautionary Principle in Banking and Financial Matters
This contribution highlights the fundamental role of the precautionary principle in the development and implementation of the Banking Union. It rests on three pillars, the Single Supervision Mechanism, the Single Resolution Mechanism and the Unified Deposit Protection System, reflecting in a pyramidal form a graduated approach to systemic risk.
The increasing use of algorithmic governance technologies to process financial transactions is generating new types of risk, linked to the unprecedented speed and volume of orders processed by robots. In an attempt to neutralize these dangers, regulators are using the same type of automated instruments to adjust their reaction speed to the speed of the transactions to be controlled.
Finally, the phenomenon of generating private currencies through self-certified cryptographic mechanisms, such as blockchain, represents a challenge for the sovereignty of the authorities in charge of public policies, based on a foundation of constitutional legitimacy, because they tend to avoid the State apparatus. Here again, the precautionary principle calls for the establishment of a currency of the same nature, but not free of any governing legal system. The process is being studied within the European Union and some member States, including France.


Key Words : bank - finance - money
t. 62, 2020 : p. 181-187