What’s the #1 new release in Banking Law on Amazon?  I’m glad you asked!  It’s Professor David Zaring’s first book, The Globalized Governance of Finance (Cambridge University Press).  In 2008, Zaring joined Wharton's Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department as an assistant professor.  At the time, I was a PhD student in the Department and also focused on banking law.  So, it was really exciting for me to have a banking law scholar join us and I’m thrilled to now have a chance to highlight his new book.  My copy is on its way from Amazon, so for now, I’ll share Zaring’s description of his book and my own thoughts with BLPB readers soon!

The book pulls together work I’ve done on the regulatory networks – the Basel Committee, IOSCO, IAIS, e.g., – that have become the global taste for harmonizing financial regulation.  I think the regimes, and their relative bindingness (especially Basel), are interesting in their own right, and they are also an interesting way of doing global governance, where the sine qua non is often thought to be a treaty enforced by a tribunal, a la the World Trade Organization. 

But in finance, you see neither of those things, and still robust oversight that American regulators, regardless of administration, seem to embrace.  Even as the Trump administration has pushed for changes in trade law, Randal Quarles of the Fed has been installed as chair of the Financial Stability Board, the network of networks that keeps everything moving.  The Obama administration tried to get a Basel-like process into its trade deals, and issued an executive order encouraging agencies to harmonize regulations.

Moreover, since the financial crisis, regulators have doubled down on these networks, adding political oversight from the G-20, a middle manager in the FSB, and standardizing notice and comment rulemaking at the network level.  That, I think, makes the whole scheme look increasingly like a cross-border bureaucracy.  After all, American agencies make policy through notice and comment rulemaking overseen by career regulators overseen by political leaders.  So too Basel, IOSCO, IAIS, and the other networks.