Reinforcing Supranational Bank Regulation, Supervision, Support and Resolution in Europe: Introduction

A decade on since the outbreak of the worst international financial crisis since the late 1920s, the effective design of EU bank regulation, supervision, support and resolution remains hotly contested, in both academic and policy-making circles. European Banking Union (BU), one of the most important developments in European integration since the Maastricht Treaty and the launch of Monetary Union, still ranks very high on the European Union’s reform agenda. Some reform proposals, such as the creation of the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS), have been placed on the backburner given German government concerns regarding the state of bank balance sheets in some euro area member states — and, specifically, bank holdings of nonperforming loans — and that incentives for future risk-taking have not been sufficiently reduced. Other reforms affecting all EU member states have met the determined opposition of a number of national governments and powerful bank interests, including the Commission’s proposal for a regulation on Bank Structural Reform (BSR), which was dropped by the Commission in late 2017. However, there are also a range of other legislative and institutional reforms designed to reinforce EU bank regulation and supervision which have either been proposed and / or adopted. The main objectives of these reforms are to make banking safer— and specifically to diminish the systemic effects of losses resulting from high risk bank activities — and to reinforce the ability of supervisory authorities to monitor effectively bank activity. By shedding light on a number of difficult issues facing these topics, the articles of this special issue seek to provide contributions that are helpful to both academics and policy makers.