Although the world of banking and finance is becoming more integrated every day, in most aspects the world of financial regulation continues to be narrowly defined by national boundaries. The main players here are still national governments and governmental agencies. And until recently, they tended to follow a policy of shielding their activities from scrutiny by their peers and members of the academic community rather than inviting critical assessments and an exchange of ideas. The turbulence in international financial markets in the 1980s, and its impact on US banks, gave rise to the notion that academics working in the field of banking and financial regulation might be in a position to make a contribution to the improvement of regulation in the United States, and thus ultimately to the stability of the entire financial sector. This provided the impetus for the creation of the “US Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee”. In the meantime, similar shadow committees have been founded in Europe, Japan and Latin America. The specific problems associated with financial regulation in Europe, as well as the specific features which distinguish the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (ESFRC) from its counterparts in the US and Japan, derive from the fact that while Europe has already made substantial progress towards economic and political integration, it is still primarily a collection of distinct nation–states with differing institutional set-ups and political and economic traditions. Therefore, any attempt to work towards a European approach to financial regulation must include an effort to promote the development of a European culture of co-operation in this area, and this is precisely what the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee seeks to do. In this paper, Harald Benink, chairman of the ESFRC, and Reinhard H. Schmidt, one of the two German members, discuss the origin, the objectives and the functioning of the committee and the thrust of its recommendations.

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alleged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of measurement, the following question is addressed: Is there a general trend toward disintermediation, with banks losing importance to the markets, that is causing these three financial systems to converge? We find that there is neither a general trend toward disintermediation, nor toward a transformation from bank-based to capital market-based financial systems, nor toward a loss of importance of banks. Only in the case of France could strong signs of transformation as well as signs of a general decline in the role of banks be found. Thus the three financial systems also do not seem to be converging. However, there is also a common pattern of change: the intermediation chains are lengthening in all three countries. Nonbank financial intermediaries are taking over a more important role as mobilizers of capital from the nonfinancial sectors. In combination with the trend toward securitization of bank liabilities, this change increases the funding costs of banks and may put banks under pressure. In the case of France, this change is so pronounced that it might even threaten the stability of the financial system. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G21 and G23.