logo
Financial Regulation and Governance

 

All Banks Insurance Markets Payments and monetary instruments International financial regulation Fintechs

 

About Frank Vogl's "The Enablers. How the West supports kleptocrats and corruption -endangering our democracy" - A Financial and Political Economy of Corruption

By François Valérian
November 2021
Frank Vogl's latest book exposes, based on a very rich documentation, a financial and political economy of corruption. The author's background has given him first-hand knowledge of many of the problems and issues he deals with. As a journalist, former World Bank executive, co-founder of Transparency International, and academic, he has been able to observe and ...
read more

The troubling resilience
of the offshore centers

By François Valérian
June 2021
After a decade of global crackdown on offshore centers, four of them, Luxembourg, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, have slightly increased in importance in global finance, accounting for about 15% of global cross-border investment flows in 2019. All major banks and most major mining conglomerates have significant relationships with them. ...
read more

The role of central banks and supervisory authorities in stimulating consideration for
long-term issues: The case of climate change

By Nathalie Aufauvre & Clément Bourgey
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Economic agents often think, decide and act with a relatively short-term view — in any case, too short to take account of long-term issues and risks. Central banks and supervisory authorities have a decisive role in leading these agents to reckon with long-term risks. Climate change provides a very good example, since coordinated international actions by these banks and ...
read more

What can institutional investors do
in matters related to
climate change and responsible investments?

By Jean-François Boulier
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Institutional investors, everywhere around the world, are involved in the long-term financing of the economy — in France to the tune of approximately €3200 billion (more than a year of GNP), an amount that has constantly grown over the past decades. Dutch retirement funds alone manage the equivalent of more than two years of their country’s GNP. ...
read more

From ESG ratings to stress tests
aligned with the Paris Agreement
and sustainable development goal

By Anne-Catherine Husson-Traore
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Based on declarations and on multiple criteria for environmental, social and corporate governance, ESG ratings for big firms emerged at the turn of this century. The result is a database, big but barely legible because it has not been standardized. Firms determine the information (scope, methodology and indicators) to provide, thus making it nearly impossible to make ...
read more

The long-term coherence of cooperatives
is more a matter of principles than facts

By Pierre-Charles Pradier
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Cooperatives are organizations with, in principle, a democratic governance; but they can be legally organized in quite varied forms, which, in turn, condition the potential expression of short-termism. When the profits placed in a reserve fund cannot be “shared” (nor directly appropriated), a short-termism specific to cooperatives might arise. ...
read more

Corporate reform:
From the firm or from the field?

By Cécile Renouard
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
How to interpret the aspects of the French PACTE Act related to a firm’s economic, social and environmental responsibilities? An analysis of the act and of the recommendations made in the Senard-Notat Report brings to light the limits of the commitments demanded from firms in matters related to social and environmental issues and the climate. What if we shift ...
read more

Firms with a mission
as a vector of the long term

By Blanche Segrestin, Laure-Anne Parpaleix
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Since short-termism has come under criticism, how can a firm’s strategic choices take account of long-term interests? Can long-term shareholding be fostered, and would it suffice? To answer these questions, this article examines how we apprehend the long term. Instead of defining it in relation to the investment horizon of a firm’s plans, innovation forces us to see the long term as ...
read more

Can companies finance
long-term environmental transitions?

By Claire Tutenuit
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Industrial, service or financial companies are keen to raise funds to invest in the transformation of society in order to preserve the climate and biodiversity. There is a pressing need and therefore enormous opportunities. On the other hand, these types of investments are generally not economically viable due to their often unattractive risk/reward ratio. ...
read more


Finance, business and the long term

By Claire Castanet
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
It is often remarked that capital markets force companies into short-term strategies. Yet finance is not entirely synonymous with the short term, since there are long-term investors who want to provide long-term support for companies. A company that is committed to the long term, however, must also be run by women and men whose concerns must not be reduced...
read more
“Intérêt social” and “raison d’être”:
Thoughts about two core provisions of the Business Growth and Transformation Action Plan (PACTE) Act that amend corporate law

By Alain Pietrancosta
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
The Business Growth and Transformation Action Plan (PACTE) Act of 22 May 2019 has the clear goal of “reviewing the position of businesses within society”. Along with the introduction of a special “société à mission” (similar to a community interest company) status, it makes two major amendments to French corporate law in its Article 169, one of which is mandatory...
read more


Risks and the government of firms

By François Valérian
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Due to risks of misconduct by company managers, corporate government should be reformed along the lines of a separation of powers and with the creation of a new position, namely that of risk and compliance officer reporting directly to the board of directors.

...
read more

The EU Directive on preventive restructuring frameworks –
a chance for France to focus on the long term?

By Sophie Vermeille and Eva Fourel
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
The directive adopted by the Council of the European Union on 6 June 2019 offers France the opportunity to make a paradigm shift towards effective legislation for companies in difficulty. For the moment, French law conflates the goal of efficiency with that of equity, favouring short-term job preservation and thus penalising the French economy. It is important to understand that effective...
read more

Family Firms versus Private Equity:
A struggle of business models?
The example of the German printing industry

By Ida Bagel and Michael Troege
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
With the growth of the Private Equity (PE) industry an increasing number of firms remain for substantial periods in the ownership of PE companies. Today, PE owned companies are important and permanent competitors for many traditional Family Firms.
The financial and commercial strategies of both types of firms differ substantially. ...
read more

Financial Regulation and Externalities:
Efficiency vs Politics

By Gérard Hertig
November 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Fundamentally, financial regulation aims at facilitating access to finance.
From an efficiency perspective, this means that entrepreneurs as well as consumers should get financing at competitive rates. However, the rewards of financial regulation are not necessarily equally distributed, an externality that is likely to favor some financial intermediaries or industrial firms ...
read more


Regulating finance in the 21st century

By François Valérian
February 2019 - Réalités Industrielles
Finance – a swiftly-evolving area of global importance – is difficult to regulate. Regulation is needed, however, as finance affects the entire economy. The 2008 crisis gave fresh impetus to far-reaching regulatory plans and sharply highlighted the problems inherent in attempting to rein in a worldwide phenomenon from a fragmented political space. ...
read more

The retreat from systemic risk regulation:
what explains it?
(and why it was predictable)

By John C. Coffee, Jr.
November 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
Financial crises usually trigger a predictable cycle: first, a populist outburst that produces dramatic legislative and regulatory changes and, then, a slower counter-reaction as the financial industry gradually subjects the new reforms to a death by a thousand cuts, often with the result that little remains. This cycle - here called the “Regulatory Sine Curve” - can be traced back to the South Sea Bubble in ...
read more

Delegating Regulation: European Union
and Financial Markets

By Sharyn O’HALLORAN, Karen CHEN and al.
November 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
This paper analyzes the design of financial regulatory structure in the European Union. We develop a two-pronged approach to track changes in decision-making authority in EU financial market regulations and directives enacted from 1964 to the present. Traditional observational data collection methods manually code laws to identify the amount of discretionary authority delegated to ...
read more

Can post-crisis regulation help mitigate the risks created by systemic institutions?

By Olivier de Bandt
August 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
The 2008 crisis was marked by large-scale government interventions to rescue systemic institutions. Injections of capital to some institutions have increased public deficits and, although they curtailed the impact of systemic shock, they fostered moral hazard. Systemic financial institutions are defined here as institutions with a "systemic impact", that is, those whose difficulties...
read more

Including macro-prudential strategies
in Euro-area macroeconomic policy

By Agnès Bénassy-Quéré
August 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and especially the euro area crisis, several innovations – including macro-prudential policies and a macroeconomic imbalance procedure – were included in Europe's economic policy structure. However, their coordination and surveillance mechanisms could be better interconnected. The goal, instruments, horizon and summary...
read more


Learning small lessons from a great crisis

By Jean-François Boulier
August 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
In the words of Nietzsche, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger”.  But are we really stronger after having emerged from this great crisis? Have we learned all there is to learn? How can we prepare for the next crisis that is sure to happen one day? I believe that now is the time to step back and try to take a more positive look at these historic events.
...
read more


Banks and tax havens
By Vincent Bouvatier, Gunther Capelle-Blancard
and Anne-Laure Delatte
August 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
Since the 2008 financial crisis, a string of scandals – UBS in 2008, Offshore Leaks in 2013, Lux Leaks in 2014, Swiss Leaks in 2015, Panama Papers and Football Leaks in 2016, Paradise Papers in 2017 – have brought to light the role played by banks in tax avoidance, money laundering, setting up shell companies, and circumventing international regulations. ...
read more

Crisis and cooperative solutions:
the euro area since 2008

By Jérôme Creel
August 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
Since the European integration process began, the European Union has always moved forward in fits and starts, from one crisis to the next. But, the most-recent crisis showed up fault lines in its economic governance.
The euro area was seriously affected by the US banking crisis which started in September 2008.
...
read more


Preventing systemic risk

By Jean-François Lepetit
August 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
The 2008-2011 crisis provided a rationale for regulating credit intermediation by banks, which reduces, as much as possible, the risk that such intermediation will result in a systemic crisis. This is a welcome outcome. However, ring-fencing the banking function has expanded the role of market intermediation under conditions that make this mode of credit intermediation ...
read more

The complexity of the regulatory response
to the crisis

By Pierre-Charles Pradier
August 2018 - Réalités Industrielles
While the 2008 financial crisis originated and first erupted in the United States, the response was organised on a global scale. After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on 15 September and an emergency bailout plan for AIG was announced the next day, the G7 Finance Ministers meeting scheduled for October seemed to be too little, too late for Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, ...
read more
The majority of the articles published here were translated from French to English by the Translation Centre of the French economy and finance ministries.
The remaining articles were translated by Noal Mellott.


Mise à jour le 16 Novembre 2021


Politique de gestion des données personnelles et cookies