This book deals with financial liberalization issues in the context of trade negotiations. The liberalization of trade and investment in financial services is only a subset of the broader financial liberalization agenda. The purpose of trade and investment liberalization is to increase financial...

In the United States and Europe faulty credit ratings and flawed rating processes are widely perceived as being among the key contributors to the global financial crisis. That has brought them under intense scrutiny and led to proposals for radical reforms. The ongoing debate, while centered in...

The immediate financial sector policy responses to the financial crisis, including emergency liquidity support, expansion of financial safety nets, and interventions in financial institutions, have succeeded in stemming widespread panic. But the effort has generally been insufficient and ad hoc....

The financial crisis has prompted a shift toward a tighter and more macro-prudential approach to financial regulation. But the reform agenda still needs to address the role of supervisory (rather than regulatory) failures, while the institutional arrangements needed to implement the new...

Global trends taken for granted in recent decades, the big expansion in global financial assets compared with underlying economic activity, growing global financial integration, shrinking role of the state in financial systems, and rising share of cross-border ownership of financial...

Regulators concerned about the costs of bank insolvency and of systemic risk arising from the volatility of bank trading portfolios have developed three different approaches to setting risk-based minimum capital adequacy standards for market risk. The author evaluates those three...

The objective of this paper is to address the main considerations for China of including financial services in its preferential trade agreements. The paper briefly reviews China's financial liberalization process and the state of its domestic financial system, discusses the main considerations...

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the changes in the calculation of minimum regulatory capital requirements for credit risk that have been drafted by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Basel II). Even though the revised credit capital rules represent a dramatic...