Financial Literacy Importance

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Financial Literacy Financial literacy is defined, by Investopedia, as “the possession of knowledge and understanding of financial matters.” It is generally mentioned in the context of personal finance. It essentially pertains to one’s ability to grasp and manage one’s own savings and how one chooses o invests it. It needs to be understood in the context of one’s understanding of investment avenues and their respective features. The significance of financial literacy lies in the fact that one’s savings are almost always limited compared to one’s needs and, therefore, the return from the same needs to be maximised. If one does not invest these funds, another danger is that these will lose value due to inflation. It also follows that the…show more content…
A correct understanding of the working of these products will help a person to maximise the returns on one’s portfolio and an incorrect understanding will lead to a loss of value. One of the main causes of the destruction of investor wealth which occurred during the recent recession can be traced to the lack of understanding with respect to complex structured financial products such as Mortgage-backed Securities (MBS) and and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). One of the reforms brought about due to this problem was the set up of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of a series of reforms required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act enacted at that time. The mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for consumers by making rules more effective, by consistently and fairly enforcing those rules, and by empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives. This body also runs financial literacy campaigns across the…show more content…
In India, the issue of financial literacy has become a high priority issue among Indian regulators. SEBI has a fund exclusively devoted to this objective called Investor Protection Fund. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) runs many financial education campaigns catering to all sections of Society most notably the release of children’s comic series such as Money Kumar, Old Man Monetary and Raju. It also a whole webpage dedicated to financial education on its website: Thus, it has been seen how significant financial literacy is for the well-being of every person. We have also seen how regulators in USA and India have dealt with this need. We see that a completely different body has been set up in the USA to address the issue of consumer protection with respect to financial products whereas this duty of financial protection of Individual is dealt with by National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission just as in the case of the conventional consumer goods. Finally, we have also seen how various bodies promote financial literacy in India and

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