• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.161-189
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• 2009

The sub-prime crisis led to the collapse of US investment banks which were considered highly competitive during the Asian Financial Crisis. The event gave us a lesson on importance of the financial supervision. Additionally concerns rise over the fact that the role model of the Capital Market Law, created for the purpose of developing the capital market, is the US investment banks. This paper investigates if the prudential regulations, among them especially the capital regulation, are able to prevent the risk the arises from Korean financial firms operating investment bank business. The current capital requirement regulation, Net Capital Ratio(NCR), is not sufficient, because it's nature of being a ratio makes the NCR ineffective when assets and liabilities are concurrently rising. We also verified the internal model which measured the market risk, by comparing the US investment and Korean banks' diversification effect. The result of the test is that it is difficult to conclude the internal model has a critical defect. This paper's contribution is that it is not sufficient use only the capital regulation in supervising financial markets.