Politicians and Financial Supervision Architectures : Trends and the Italian Case

In recent years we have witnessed a deep change in the design of all the institutions that are responsible for supervising banking and financial markets. The financial supervision scenario is going through a deep evolution on all fronts, and many countries have made important changes in the overall architecture, redefining who is responsible for what.How is the conventional face of supervision changing in all the segments of financial markets? And what are the determinants of one supervisory regime versus another? Our standpoint focuses on the role that politicians can play in reshaping the regime, given that, as a matter of fact, they take the decision to maintain or reform an institutional setting.The paper is organized as follows. In Section Two we describe the actual landscape of the financial supervision architecture in a cross-country perspective. In Section Three we discuss the role that political preferences play in determining the shape of the supervisory setting. The empirical analysis in Section Four allows us to shed light on the factors affecting the choice of supervisory regimes. We discuss the case of Italy in Section Five, while Section Six attempts some preliminary conclusions