The current financial and sovereign crisis is pushing European politicians and EU bureaucrats to devise new institutional and policy solutions. However, the new EU institutional framework and stricter regulatory requirements do not introduce significant changes in the laissez-faire nature of the...

Unlike the official view which ascribes the current crisis to some anomalies of the securitisation processes, and consistently proposes minor adjustments to the existing regulatory apparatus, our opinion is that we are facing the last episode of a string of crises originated by the structural...

Since deregulation in the 1980s, all advanced countries have gone along the same route increasingly shaping their financial regulations according to principles and theoretical models set out by global standard setters. Structural fragilities, failures of regulators, and short-sighted supervisors...

The recent crisis has promoted a rethinking of financial globalisation, a revision that has also partially interested some official circles. National supervisors have often reacted to the crises of cross-border banks by ring fencing local interests. Some proposals (e.g. the Vickers Report and...

The proposal for a European banking union represents the more recent effort to drive the Eurozone countries towards the effective adoption of a single rulebook and a single supervisory handbook, at the same time endowing them with a centralised mechanism for the resolution of bank crises. The...

This Report provides an introduction to the seven country studies on the implementation of the European Directives on Banking and Finance in the period from the introduction of the Single European Act to the 2007/8 Global financial crisis and the additional national measures that have been taken...