Search results

The article discusses how the emergence of a policy of financial stability in international and European economic law has an impact on private relations, leading private law itself to become an instrument of financial stability. The result is an intersection of financial regulation and private law whereby financial regulation addresses consumer protection top-down and private law addresses financial stability bottom-up. The incorporation of the goal of financial stability nonetheless creates tensions in private law, since the latter aims at further objectives, occasionally leading to conflicts. The article shows how the accommodation of those objectives requires the striking of balances, and discusses instances in which case law of European courts arbitrated between different interests producing dissimilar results in different contexts. This casts further doubts on the consistency of the notion of financial stability as a policy or legal principle; despite its prominence at the international and European level, it unfolds in different forms depending on the interests at stake.

Abstract
The awareness that consumer over-indebtedness is a problem which needs to be tackled through specific measures most clearly emerged at the end of a period in which increased availability of retail financial services was presented as a means to promote consumers' welfare. While, on the one hand, over-indebtedness is regarded as a problem to be counteracted, European law and policy, on the other hand, promote indebtedness, leading to a fragile equilibrium between opposing purposes which permeate the regulatory framework. How can the two objectives be reconciled, allowing for well-ordered development of a credit-based economy in which debtors in financial trouble are not left behind? This paper suggests the necessity of taking a holistic approach to over-indebtedness, starting from the assumption that, rather than being the manifestation of individual inability to properly deal with finance, the phenomenon is inherent to a credit economy and that modern law must therefore tackle it systematically through a combination of measures: private and public, contractual and non-contractual, preventive and curative, national and supranational. While articulating a critique of some of the rationales underlying 'debt law', the paper highlights the necessary interrelation between the possible legal strategies against household over-indebtedness and the need to coordinate them in order to reach an adequate level of protection.