International Banking Deregulation

Considers the new global banking and financial systems which have become the subject of an unprecedented experiment involving new and unquantifiable risks. Based on up to the minute research, Dale offers a warning about structural faults at the heart of banking systems worldwide.

A wave of liberalization swept the developed world at end of the twentieth century. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, most developed countries have passed various measures to liberalize and modernize the financial markets. Each country had its agenda, but most of them have experienced, to a different extent, a change in regulatory regime. This change, often labeled deregulation and associated with the advent of neoliberalism, was sharply contrasting with the previous era of the Bretton Woods system, which has sometimes been portrayed as an era of financial repression. On the other hand, a quick glance at financial regulation today - at the amount of paper it produces, at its complexity, at the number of people involved, and at the resources invested in it - is enough to say that, somehow, there is more regulation today than ever before. In the new system, financial regulation has taken unprecedented importance. As more archival material is becoming available, a better understanding of the fundamental changes in the regulatory environment towards the end of the twentieth century is now possible. What kind of change exactly was deregulation? Did competition between financial regulators lead to a race to the bottom in regulation? Is deregulation responsible for the recurring financial crises which seem to have characterised the international financial system since the 1980s? The movement towards a more liberal regulatory regime was neither linear nor simple. This book - a collection of chapters studying deregulation in various countries and contexts - examines the national and international pathways of deregulation by providing an in-depth analysis of a short but crucial period in a few major countries.

Financial intermediation and financial services industries have undergone many changes in the past two decades due to deregulation, globalization, and technological advances. The framework for regulating finance has seen many changes as well, with approaches adapting to new issues arising in specific groups of countries or globally. The objectives of this paper are twofold: to review current international thinking on what regulatory framework is needed to develop a financial sector that is stable, yet efficient, and provides proper access to households and firms; and to review the key experiences regarding international financial architecture initiatives, with a special focus on issues arising for developing countries. The paper outlines a number of areas of current debate: the special role of banks, competition policy, consumer protection, harmonization of rules-across products, within markets, and globally-and the adaptation and legitimacy of international standards to the circumstances facing developing countries. It concludes with some areas where more research would be useful.

This book presents a comprehensive examination of the deregulation of financial markets that began in the United States in the mid-1960s and has now reached global proportions. The author examines the deregulatory steps taken in each of the major financial markets--the United States, Britain, Japan, Australia, and Hong Kong--exploring the impetus behind the deregulatory developments, their potency, and their effects on the operational, promotional, and allocational efficiency of financial markets. Khoury also assesses the effects of deregulation on the stability of financial markets and on the movement toward political and economic integration within these markets. Throughout, Khoury focuses particular attention on the dynamics of the deregulation process and the forces that generated it in each of the markets under study. Khoury begins by tracing the evolution of the internationalization of the financial markets and their deregulation over the last three decades. He then examines the economics of financial deregulation and the implications of regulatory changes. Four chapters are devoted to extended analysis of deregulation in the various financial centers. Khoury compares and contrasts the similarities and differences among the five markets, examines the impact of regulatory developments in each market, and analyzes the growing interrelationships among financial markets. A separate chapter looks at the effects of deregulation on the foreign exchange, money, and stock markets, and on the performance and stability of the banking sector. Finally, Khoury looks to the future of deregulation, describing the changes that are likely to occur in the regulatory structure and in the money and capital markets. Ideal as supplemental reading for courses in international finance and banking, this book also offers bankers and regulators new insights into the potential and actual effects of various regulatory and deregulatory measures.

Financial regulation is often framed as a question of economic efficiency. This paper, by contrast, puts the distributive implications of financial regulation center stage. We develop a model in which the financial sector benefits from risk-taking by earning greater expected returns. However, risktaking also increases the incidence of large losses that lead to credit crunches and impose negative externalities on the real economy. We describe a Pareto frontier along which different levels of risktaking map into different levels of welfare for the two parties. A regulator has to trade off efficiency in the financial sector, which is aided by deregulation, against efficiency in the real economy, which is aided by tighter regulation and a more stable supply of credit. We also show that financial innovation, asymmetric compensation schemes, concentration in the banking system, and bailout expectations enable or encourage greater risk-taking and allocate greater surplus to the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy.

This title was first published in 2003. This text aims to fill a gap in the literature for a text on the theory and practice of international regulatory competition in the open financial markets of the US and UK.