The author aims at identifying the new locus of power where banking regulation has roots after the crisis, wondering if local initiatives signify a radical transition in global banking regulation capable of unsettling the neoliberal Basel approach.

Chapter 5 deals with an analysis on the relationship between two apparently conflicting regulatory agendas: on the one side the Financial Stability Board at a global level, while, on the other side, local regulatory projects outside the Basel envelope. The author aims at identifying the new locus of power where banking regulation has roots after the crisis, wondering if local initiatives signify a radical transition in global banking regulation capable of unsettling the neoliberal Basel approach. A study of the reform initiatives contains an intricate net of banking regulation and, for this reason, it is not easy to identify a unique answer to such an analysis. The author describes the basic Basel II neoliberal regulatory strategy of not governing banks at a distance and also discusses its tortious, fear-laden nature. She then considers the post-crisis Basel reforms and charts the emerging post-crisis Basel regulatory strategies. The following section is focused on the national and regional regulatory initiatives that the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union have undertaken to supplement the Basel reforms. It seems very interesting to consider the possible impacts of a collision of the local structural regulation initiatives. Among the conclusions of the author, the Basel strategy is not exclusively and orthodoxly neoliberal; it contains paternalist and interventionist tendencies which augment its neoliberal agenda with a tacit small-scale structural regulation project. The structural regulation initiatives also betray their non-neoliberal initial outlook. The initiatives seem primarily designed to allow neoliberal banking to continue, but in a new institutional setting where some of its most pernicious potential effects and flagrant perverse consequences are contained to ensure that neoliberal global markets are not endangered. The Basel rules and the structural regulation initiatives converge upon a tortious neoliberal strategy which attempts to fix the shortcomings of a neoliberal strategy with somewhat unorthodox tools to keep the neoliberal regulatory framework afloat. Both reforms engage in a form of damage control neoliberalism by reregulating banking to allow it to remain as free and unconstrained as possible.

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