Banking Law

the totality of legal standards regulating the activities of banks and relations between them and clients (organizations and citizens served by the bank).

Soviet banking law contains standards regulating the activities of a bank as a body of state administration—that is, standards defining the procedure for carrying out credit and cash planning and banking control over the economic and financial activities of socialist organizations—as well as standards regulating relations that arise in the process of the providing of credit, the settling of accounts, the issue of cash and conversion into cash, the receiving of deposits, and the carrying out of other operations at the instructions of clients. The first set of standards constitutes part of the subject matter of Soviet administrative (financial) law, whereas standards involving deposits by citizens constitute subject matter of Soviet civil law. Thus banking law is not an autonomous branch of Soviet law, but a complex subbranch that contains standards of various branches of law that are united by a common purpose—the regulation of a bank’s activities. The standards of banking law also regulate the organization and structure of the system of credit institutions of the USSR; the main principles of their activities; the organization of monetary circulation; the procedure for opening payment accounts, current accounts, and other accounts and deposits and the conduct of operations on them; and the organization and carrying out of operations in the financing of capital investments, the cash fulfillment of the USSR state budget, and operations with foreign exchange and precious metals.

The basic principles of Soviet banking law are the socialist state’s carrying out, through the banks, of the planned accumulation, distribution, and utilization of the monetary resources necessary for the fulfillment of the state’s functions and tasks; the reinforcement and development of commodity and monetary relations in accordance with the new content characteristic of them in the period of socialism; the legal regulation of the activities of banks in the direction of all-around assistance to the development of the socialist national economy and the creation of a material and technical base for communism; and the reinforcement of the legal status of socialist banks as bodies of state administration that carry out planning and control functions, as well as economically accountable organizations that perform credit, payment, investment, and currency operations. The sources of Soviet banking law, besides the normative enactments that are common to Soviet law, are acts (instructions, regulations, and so on) which are issued by the banks on the basis of, and in implementation of, existing legislation and which are mandatory for their clientele.