The process towards the centralisation of the European financial supervisory architecture: the case of the Banking Union

The political and theoretical developments, which arose after the global crisis, have produced a profound reappraisal of the central banks’ contribution in achieving and maintaining financial stability. This evolution has had important consequences for the institutional architecture of financial supervision and for the role assigned to central banks within it. At the same time, the key role played by central banks during the crisis in helping to stabilise financial systems with conventional and unconventional measures was probably a deciding factor in politically legimising their their greater involvement in financial supervision, whose prevailing micro-prudential approach was one of the main causes of the crisis itself. The policies for financial stability, which go from crisis prevention to crisis management, and which may involve not merely banks and the payment system, but also every sector in the financial system, blurred the limits of responsibility held by the central banks and their dealings with other regulators: especially with governments, on the one hand, and the authorities in charge of traditional micro-prudential supervision on the other. In this study evolution Evolution in models for supervisory architecture and the role given to central banks before and after the crisis in the EU have been there analysed for a selected group of countries. The aim is to find some associations with the degree of bankarisation, on the one hand, and fiscal costs of the crisis on the other.