Central banks and financial supervision: new tendencies

The post-crisis political and theoretical developments have produced a profound reappraisal of central banks’ mandate 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. The paper aims to analyse the rationale of this evolution and to what extent it has characterised the reforms introduced by EU countries after the crisis. The empirical analysis confirms the wider mandate for financial stability given to EU central banks, mainly in those countries whose structural vulnerabilities arise from high degree of financialisation. The reforms associated to this process always result from political choices: in this respect, the different path towards the new architecture, which has characterised the UK and Germany can be taken as the two most interesting cases. They show the complex interactions between political pressure, resistance and ambitions of the various existing authorities, and the country’s heritage, which characterise every stage of institutional reform, especially where significant supervisory failures have been found.