Chinese Walls in Large Financial and Market Institutions: Experiences and Lessons from Common Law Jurisdictions
Tsinghua Law Review (Qinghua Faxue), Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 149-159, 2007
12 Pages Posted: 24 Jul 2008 Last revised: 28 Aug 2016
Date Written: July 24, 2008
Abstract
Modern professional financial organizations have been inevitably subject to conflict of interest problems. The emergence of the Chinese Wall has been an innovation which has provided a convenient, if not an always successful, solution to these problems. Chinese Walls are designed to attain a balancing of public confidence in the advisory professions against the commercial needs of those professions to operate as larger entities in a cost-effective way. The attitudes towards Chinese Walls vary from country to country, depending on the level of the balancing. Experience in the relevant industries, however, has cast significant doubt on the effectiveness of Chinese Walls, suggesting that the current Chinese Walls are far from ideal, and there is a need for an array of reinforcement mechanisms which have yet to be adequately developed.
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Keywords: Chinese Wall, Financial institution, Market intermediary, Conflicts of interest
JEL Classification: K22, K33
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation