Fixing International Finance: Between International Rule-Making and Domestic Cosmetic Compliance

Abstract

International Harmonization of Financial Regulation? The Politics of Global Diffusion of the Basel Capital Accord. By Hyoung-Kyu Chey. London, UK: Routledge, 2014. 232 pp., $160 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-81242-9). The global financial crisis of 2008–2010 revealed a number of failures and gaps in the existing international financial regulatory architecture and placed the issue of financial reforms at the center of the international public policy agenda. The crisis also refocused the attention of academia, with a number of scholarly works documenting and analyzing the plethora of “international standards” that have been introduced since the beginning of the crisis to fix these international regulatory failures. International Harmonization of Financial Regulation? by Hyoung-Kyu Chey is not one of these. On the contrary, this volume looks back at an international agreement that was negotiated long before the crisis, the Basel Accord of 1988. This Accord represents a milestone in the history of international efforts to strengthen financial stability in an age of globalization by harmonizing financial regulatory policies, but this is hardly a new area of inquiry. Nevertheless, this volume is likely to prove highly relevant for investigations of more contemporary attempts to fix the international financial architecture and for understanding how these attempts may fail in achieving their goals. The main contribution of this volume derives from two ways it differs from previous analyses of the Basel Accord: First, rather than focusing on understanding the design of international standards, the …