Banking Regulation: Administrative Rules versus Market-Based Instruments

Abstract

The recent Mexican, East Asian and Russian crises and the LTCM debacle severely shook the world’s financial markets. Goodhart et ah (1998) report that since 1980, of the 181 members of the IMF, 41 have had banking crises and 108 have encountered serious banking problems, a situation not experienced since the Great Depression. In the early 1990s, for example, national idiosyncratic shocks hit the Nordic countries and the Swiss banking sector. According to Calomiris (1999), since the start of the 1980s there have been nearly 100 national financial crises, with losses of at least, the magnitude of those sustained during 1931–33 in the US.