g. interest, fees, taxes ) and / or benefits to be received by the consumer ( interest and other unconditional benefits ) and costs relating to ancillary services which are prerequisite for the use of financial service or for its use in a specific manner ( e. g. costs of life assurance, property and personal insurance ). thus, financial education can serve to augment and strengthen consumer protection but also to enable more effective allocation of money and capital on macroeconomic level. financially educated consumers are in a better position to protect themselves on their own and to report possible misconducts by financial institutions to the authorities. consumer protection and financial education share many of the same goals but each takes a somewhat different approach. both financial education and consumer protection have as aims to ensure the well - being of consumers and to shield them from misconduct. bis central bankers ’ speeches the national bank of serbia has been addressing the need to expand activities in the field of financial education and financial consumer protection since 2005. at the beginning of 2011 the nbs introduced the law on financial consumers protection. this law is prescribed not only in line with eu directive 48 / 2008 relating to consumer credit, but includes a wider range of financial products, because our intention was to cover all kind of banking services : loans including mortgages, deposits, accounts, debit and credit cards etc. the purpose was to ensure maximum protection of financial consumers in serbia. the nbs has been actively promoting consumer education and financial literacy training and programmes over the years. we are now in the process of introducing a financial education strategy of the nbs ( 2011 – 2015 ) not only in order to improve our activities in this field, but also to provide a more adequate way for our citizens, entrepreneurs, farmers, schoolchildren, and students to obtain information that are of significance for them both currently and in the future. bearing in mind that consumer protection has a reactive function – the actual problem has already taken place when the consumer is asking for help – we are aiming to place the main emphasis on financial education, especially of schoolchildren, with the aim of having a financially literate population in 5, 10 or 15 years. our overall aim however remains the need for all the participants in the financial market to be financially literate. we intend to initiate the creation of a national strategy for financial education as a necessary complement to a sound financial regulatory and supervisory framework. in doing so, we should favour and promote the establishment of coordinated public - private

is, wrong! learning from the bad experiences of the large - scale crisis, our main job as central banks and educators will be to explain to the investors that the primary role of the credit rating agencies is to give an opinion and direction on the creditworthiness of a debt issued or issuer. the rating does not provide complete guidance on other aspects essential for investment decisions, such as market liquidity or price volatility. accordingly, as we are all aware, bonds with the same rating may have very different market prices. despite this fact, and even though each rating agency has its own rating methodologies and scales, market participants have often treated similarly rated securities as generally the same. our job is also to underline the responsibility of the investors in estimating the risk exposure of the debt issue. furthermore, we should direct and highlight to the professional investors the importance of developing their own risk management function, not solely taking into account the opinion of the rating agency, but going deeper and fully understanding underlying assets and risks. long periods of rapid economic growth worldwide resulted in the narrowing of focus towards high financial gains – circumstances which gave the potential to constantly create new types of hybrid financial instruments that majority of the market did not fully understand – in some cases, not even the sophisticated financial analysts and not even the regulators themselves. more importantly, the instruments were sometimes not completely and clearly understood by the institutions that we have all looked to for proper interpretation – the rating agencies. the primary lesson of this crisis is that we can no longer rely on other market participants, and we must both individually and on national level invest significantly in financial education. in an increasingly globalized world, the possibility for localized problem solving becomes more and more difficult and we must put additional effort on taking pre - emptive action in the future. the experience has taught us that efficiency and effectiveness of measures that are justified by future possible outcomes is only productive when communicated with well - informed and properly educated market participants. financial institutions should have a responsibility to provide clients with information that clearly and accurately represents the terms and conditions associated with the products they offer. for example, effective interest rate ( eir ) should allow consumers of financial services to find out the actual cost of a financial product. on macroeconomic level effective interest rate is important to provide efficient allocation of money and capital. the task of a loan officer has to be to explain to the consumer that eir includes all the credit payments and costs payable by the financial services consumer ( e.