Motivation and Framework

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter introduces the concept and a definition of the “formalization” of banking supervision that is examined in this book and outlines the aim and scope of the book. In addition to providing the reader with an overview of the history of banking supervision in eight developed countries (the US, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and the UK), the book presents information regarding the formalization process itself. That process is assessed based on three criteria—bank regulation, supervisory authority, and supervisory activity. This approach is intended to provide more detail than a simple assessment based on banking acts that is common in financial regulation research. The aim of the analysis undertaken in this book is to identify why the history of banking supervision in various countries shares many similarities and yet also displays many differences. In Sect. 1.5, we provide an overview of the historiography of the formalization of banking supervision with a special emphasis on comparative and internationally oriented literature, while the growing body of literature on each of the national cases is discussed in subsequent chapters.