What role should regulation play in financial markets? What have been the ramifications of financial regulation? To answer these and other questions regarding the efficacy of legislation on financial markets, this book examines the impact of the Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), also called the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, which fundamentally changed the financial landscape in the United States. The GLBA allows the formation of financial holding companies that can offer an integrated set of commercial banking, securities and insurance products. The tenth anniversary of the most sweeping financial legislation reform in the industry’s structure is a natural benchmark for assessing the effects of the law and for questioning whether changes are necessary in the working of this historic legislation. The importance of this review is reinforced by a variety of proposals in the last several years to reform the regulation of financial institutions that have attracted considerable attention among regulators and in the financial firms that they regulate. Most recently, the financial crisis and the failure of some large financial institutions have called into question the legitimacy of America’s current financial structure and its regulation, including to some degree the GLBA. There is no doubt that regulatory reform is front and center on today’s policy agenda. The lessons of the GLBA experience and its effects, both domestic and international, on financial markets and competitiveness, risk-taking and risk management by financial services firms and their regulators will be critical to the direction the country takes and the effort to ensure that future financial crises do not occur or have less costly damage. With contributions from academics, policy experts, and a sponsor of the GLBA, Congressman James Leach, this book is invaluable to anyone interested in financial system reform.

A Brookings Institution Press and Asian Development Bank Institute publication The rapid spread and far-reaching impact of the global financial crisis have highlighted the need for strengthening financial systems in advanced economies and emerging markets. Emerging markets face particular challenges in developing their nascent financial systems and making them resilient to domestic and external shocks. Financial reforms are critical to these economies as they pursue programs of high and sustainable growth. In this timely volume Masahiro Kawai, Eswar Prasad, and their contributors offer a systematic overview of recent developments in—and the latest thinking about—regulatory frameworks in both advanced countries and emerging markets. Their analyses and observations clearly point out the challenges to improving regulation, efficiency of markets, and access to the fi nancial system. Policymakers and financial managers in emerging markets are struggling to learn from the crisis and will need to grapple with some key questions as they restructure and reform their financial markets: • What lessons does the global financial crisis of 2007–09 offer for the establishment of efficient and flexible regulatory structures? • How can policymakers develop broader financial markets while managing the associated risks? • How—or should—they make the formal financial system more accessible to more people? • How might they best contend with multinational financial institutions? This book is an important step in getting a better grasp of these issues and making progress toward solutions that strike a balance between promoting financial market development and efficiency on the one hand, and ensuring financial stability on the other.

Financial markets have become acknowledged as a source of crisis, and discussion of them has shifted from economics, through legal and regulatory studies, to politics. Events from 2008 onwards raise important, cross-disciplinary questions: must financial markets drive states into political and existential crisis, must public finances take over private losses, must citizens endure austerity? This book argues that there is an alternative. If the financial system were less 'connected', contagion within the market would be reduced and crises would become more localised and intermittent, less global and pervasive. The question then becomes how to reduce connectedness within financial markets. This book argues that the democratic direction of financial market policies can deliver this. Politicising financial market policies – taking discussion of these issues out of the sphere of the 'technical' and putting it into the same democratically contested space as, for example, health and welfare policies – would encourage differing policies to emerge in different countries. Diversity of regulatory regimes would result in some business models being attracted to some jurisdictions, others to others. The resulting heterogeneity, when viewed from a global perspective, would be a reversal of recent and current tendencies towards one single/global 'level playing field', within which all financial firms and sectors have become closely connected and across which contagion inevitably reigns. No doubt the democratisation of financial market policy would be opposed by big firms – their interests being served by regulatory convergence – and considered macabre by some financial regulators and central bankers, who are coalescing into an elite community. However, everyone else, Nicholas Dorn argues here, would be better off in a financial world characterised by greater diversity.

This report studies the role of leverage in the current financial crisis and federal oversight of leverage. The objectives were to review: (1) how leveraging and de-leveraging by financial institutions may have contributed to the crisis; (2) regulations adopted by federal financial regulators to limit leverage and how regulators oversee compliance with the regulations; and (3) any limitations the current crisis has revealed in regulatory approaches used to restrict leverage and regulatory proposals to address them. Includes recommendations. Charts and tables.

Over the decade or so since the global financial crisis rocked EU financial markets and led to wide-ranging reforms, EU securities and financial markets regulation has continued to evolve. The legislative framework has been refined and administrative rulemaking has expanded. Alongside, the Capital Markets Union agenda has developed, the UK has left the EU, and ESMA has emerged as a decisive influence on EU financial markets governance. All these developments, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, have shaped the regulatory landscape and how supervision is organized. EU Securities and Financial Markets Regulation provides a comprehensive, critical, and contextual account of the intricate rulebook that governs EU financial markets and its supporting institutional arrangements. It is framed by an assessment of how the regime has evolved over the decade or so since the global financial crisis and considers, among other matters, the post-crisis reforms to key legislative measures, the massive expansion of administrative rulemaking and of soft law, the Capital Markets Union agenda, the development of supervisory convergence as the means for organizing pan-EU supervision, and ESMA's role in EU financial markets governance. Its coverage extends from capital-raising and the Prospectus Regulation to financial market intermediation and the MiFID II/MiFIR and IFD/IFR regimes, to the new regulatory regimes adopted since the global financial crisis (including for benchmarks and their administrators), to retail market regulation and the PRIIPs Regulation, and on to the EU's third country regime and the implications of the UK's departure from the EU. This is the fourth edition of the highly successful and authoritative monograph first published as EC Securities Regulation. Heavily revised from the third edition to reflect developments since the global financial crisis, it adopts the in-depth contextual and analytical approach of earlier editions and so considers the market, political, institutional, and international context of the regulatory and supervisory regime.

Law Reform and Financial Markets addresses how law reform can be used to support strong financial markets and draws on the Global Financial Crisis as a case study. This edited collection reflects recent developments, including the EU institutional reforms and Dodd-Frank Act 2010. The different contributions adopt a range of theoretical, contextual, and substantive perspectives, examine different domestic, regional, and international contexts and assess public and private law frameworks in considering how legal and regulatory reforms can be most effectively designed for strong financial markets. This comprehensive book will appeal to academics and postgraduates in the field of financial regulation and in cognate fields, including finance and economics, as well as to regulators and policymakers.

Well-functioning financial markets are crucial for the economic well-being and the justice of contemporary societies. The Great Financial Crisis has shown that a perspective that naively trusts in the self-regulating powers of free markets cannot capture what is at stake in understanding and regulating financial markets. The damage done by the Great Financial Crisis, including its distributive consequences, raises serious questions about the justice of financial markets as we know them. This volume brings together leading scholars from political theory, law, and economics in order to explore the relation between justice and financial markets. Broadening the perspective from a purely economic one to a liberal egalitarian one, the volume explores foundational normative questions about how to conceptualize justice in relation to financial markets, the biases in the legal frameworks of financial markets that produce unjust outcomes, and perspectives of justice on specific institutions and practices in contemporary financial markets. Written in a clear and accessible language, the volume presents analyses of how financial markets (should) function and how the Great Financial Crisis came about, proposals for how the structures of financial markets could be reformed, and analysis of why reform is not happening at the speed that would be desirable from a perspective of justice.

The EU and the US responded to the global financial crisis by changing the rules for the functioning of financial services and markets and by establishing new oversight bodies. With the US Dodd–Frank Act and numerous EU regulations and directives now in place, this book provides a timely and thoughtful explanation of the key elements of the new regimes in both regions, of the political processes which shaped their content and of their practical impact. Insights from areas such as economics, political science and financial history elucidate the significance of the reforms. Australia's resilience during the financial crisis, which contrasted sharply with the severe problems that were experienced in the EU and the US, is also examined. The comparison between the performances of these major economies in a period of such extreme stress tells us much about the complex regulatory and economic ecosystems of which financial markets are a part.