The Lisbon Treaty came into force in the European Union as the global financial crisis developed into a European sovereign debt crisis. Transparency is a component of accountability, and a means of addressing the EU's democratic deficit. The Lisbon Treaty established a new commitment to...

This paper argues that the global financial crisis still in train is a system-wide financial crisis on par with the Great Depression and the bursting of Japan's bubble, and that there are lessons to be learned from previous system-wide financial crises. The primary argument is that because a...

This paper makes a comparison between the US and the European reforms of the financial markets. At a first glance, these two schemes move from a similar less-market-and-more State grounds. However, a closer examination will show some differences the success of the reform may depend on....

The stunning failure of banks put regulatory intervention high on the agenda of governments. Adequate risk monitoring, including by credit rating agencies, measurement and management have proven to be a daunting task, whereas regulation of innovative financial instruments has not brought about...

At the EU and national levels, regulatory authorities are implementing or planning reforms of institutional arrangements for financial supervision. In spite of integrated supervision and regulation at the EU level, EU Member States still retain enforceable supervisory power. Recent developments...

The global financial crisis has exposed the many limits of disclosure as an effective regulatory tool in financial markets. First, the famed disciplining power of the market failed to constrain disastrous risk taking by banks. Second, most of the risks that led to the creation of the 2008...

Regulators and policy-makers have converged in recognising structured products as the engines that brought increasing instability in financial markets in the years before the 2008 global financial crisis. Innovations in structured finance, which culminated with the development of synthetic CDOs...

The financial crisis and its ensuing effects have brought back into the limelight the issue of cycles and of policies which fuel or mitigate crises. Cognitive and operational models in economics and business are questioned. There is a specter of much lower economic growth in the industrialized...