A Brief History of Governance in the Financial Sector

Abstract

The history of international governance in the financial sector is regularly portrayed as a story of deregulation and liberalization (Cerny 1993; Helleiner 1994; Cohen 1998; Strange 1996), meaning of devolving international (legal) institutions. When looking more closely, the evolution has followed an idealtype path from formal intergovernmental, via informal trans governmental towards increasingly privatized governance institutions — thereby furnishing proof for the sceptical hypothesis that international legalization has been replaced by transnationalization. At least this was the narrative until 2008. The global financial crisis has lead governments around the globe individually and collectively to re-regulate international financial markets to a degree that was previously unthinkable though nevertheless, the post-crisis measures are best described as constituting incremental rather than revolutionary change, at least at the international level.