금융투자업자에 대한 외국환거래제도의 개선방안

Since 2013, the Korean financial regulators have made some financial reforms to develop promising business entrepreneurs, ease corporate financing, and strengthen the competitiveness of the Korean financial industry following to the rapid change of an economic, financial environment worldwide. In the meantime, the regulators have felt that the portfolio diversification strategy through investment to foreign securities markets and the globalization of capital transactions are in particular very important for the increase of people``s wealth overall in the low-growth, low-interest time with a number of aging peoples, Foreign exchange transaction authorities have implemented some policies for reducing the vulnerability of capital flows and stabilizing a domestic foreign exchange market, which include three kinds of actions for macro-soundness of the foreign exchange market : ① an apportionment for the soundness of a foreign currency, ② the position limit of forwards, ③ taxations against bond investments by foreigners. These methods are adopted in order to prevent a very short-term capital flows in the foreign exchange transaction market. It should be noted, however, that the weight of short-term capital flows are very high in comparison with mid-term or long-term capital flows in Korea. Strengthening the function of a capital market result in the growth of mid-term or long-term capital flows eventually, by increasing outbound foreign investments and inducing inbound long-term investments. For this purpose, the Foreign Exchange Transaction Act and the Capital Market Act should be improved harmoniously. The revision of the Capital Market Act in 2013 based on the negative system have reserved open seats for the Korean version of an investment bank. However, the Foreign Exchange Transaction Act is a hurdle against investment banks because it imposes on various mechanisms prohibiting the engagement of a new business by investment banks through the positive system. This is the case of an investment bank in Korea, and a general brokerdealer is same to or much worse than the investment bank. The negative system of the Capital Market Act can not harmonize with the positive system of the Foreign Exchange Transaction Act. This paper aims to improve the foreign transaction system of Korean broker-dealers harmoniously by analyzing and comparing the merits and weaknesses of those two Acts.