Giuliano Castellano

 

The seminar will explore the main features of the financial regulatory framework
in Europe and the US. Financial rules in such legal systems are strongly influenced by global standards; nevertheless, domestic idiosyncrasies are significant, and will be properly investigated. This is particularly true when recent national reforms are considered. In many countries, the structural dimension of national policy makers is a sensitive policy (and political) issue. Thus, the specificities of such countries will be presented and students will be provided with the methodological tools to approach financial regulation under a comparative law and finance perspective, showing the relevance of investigating domestic dimension, which is profoundly rooted in national traditions and historical paths.

The seminar will be organized in three fundamental sections. By showing some relevant cases, the first two sections will introduce the main driving forces of financial markets and the new challenges that such phenomena might pose to policy makers. After having briefly presented the role of the international architecture governing financial markets, the main regulatory schemes adopted in the EU and the US are illustrated. Finally, in the third section, the relevant characteristics of the European financial regulatory framework are introduced together with the main characteristics of the United States legal arrangements. The narrow limits often attributed to the concept of “multi-level of governance” will be expanded in order to introduce the relevant characteristics of each model.
Issues to be covered include:

I. The Market’s Phenomena, with a general outlook over the fundamental economic phenomena driving financial markets. Accordingly, in order to identify the concerns and challenges posed by the constant evolution of financial markets, the following phenomena will be introduced: conjunctures among financial segments (financial mixed products, conglomerates); cross-border operations; technological change; crises and scandals.

 

II. The Regulatory Response, with an illustration of the economic dynamics leading national and international policy makers to define new common rules, and of the characteristics of the current international financial architecture. Against this backdrop fundamental issues will be covered such as the international rulemaking activity (soft-laws and hard-laws; e.g. Basel 2, Solvency 2, etc.), and the different domestic models (solo-structure, multiple-structure, etc).

 

III. The Comparative Analysis: EU and the US, with a focus on the core characteristics of financial markets. At first, the EU regulatory action for financial markets will be presented, by introducing the ad hoc lawmaking processes recently introduced and the fundamental rules lying at the core of the EU supervisory framework. Then, several European national specificities will be examined in order to elicit national characteristics. The evolution of the US system will be introduced in order to fully understand the current regulatory framework and explain the current debate concerning future reform projects.