Global Financial Regulation: The Essential Guide, Howard Davies and David Green (Polity: 2008)
Trying to figure out how the global regulatory system works and where it came from? Trying to de-code the alphabet soup of global groups setting regulatory standards for the financial system at home and abroad? Look no further. Howard Davies and David Green have written the book for you.
There are few more qualified people than Davies and Green to guide the non-expert through a maze of regulators, central banks, and finance ministries that have often over-lapping and confusing roles in setting regulatory standards at the global level. With the G20 process gaining speed and policymakers poised to make major decisions on the navigation system structure for the global economy this year, a good understanding of the players, their roles, and their histories is essential to making sense of the various proposals and players.
The book’s breezy pace makes it possible to absorb the broad-brush outlines of the system we have in place today and who the main players in the G20 process might be from an institutional perspective, and how they came into existence. It also provides a good introduction to the contours of the main financial regulation debates of our day (too big to fail, deposit insurance, regulatory capital, etc.).
Davies and Green have been part of the institutional structure for decades, at different levels. Their in-depth knowledge of a range of issues enables them to write this broad-ranging and general book in a way that makes sense. They have balanced well the need for some detail to illustrate points with the need to write in English for the non-expert.
But it is not for everyone. If you seek an in-depth analysis of individual issues (e.g., regulatory capital or too big to fail) or a serious history of the various global groups engaged in policymaking today, you will need to look elsewhere. If you want a sense of how the institutional structure is likely to evolve or a serious critique of the gaps that exist in regulatory structures at the global level, you will need to look elsewhere. And if you want an in-depth assessment of how those gaps contributed to the regulatory failures that created the climate in which financial market excesses could grow to a point where they would threaten entire economies, you will need to look elsewhere as well.
But if you accept the book on its own terms for what it aims to provide (a general “guide” as the title implies), then there will be few books that can match this one for depth and clarity. It will be useful to new entrants to the financial regulation policy arena and to students learning the framework from the first time. This is the kind of book I would provide to junior colleagues and trainees or to college students looking for a readable and understandable overview of the policymaking structures that exist today
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