Japan and Germany, Bank regulation and supervision, Deposit insurance, Lender of last resort, Forbearance, Varieties of capitalism, G21, G38, P52,

This case study explores the contribution of universal banking to financial stability in Germany during the recent financial crisis. Germany is a prototype for universal banking and has suffered from a rather small number of banking crises in the past. We review the banking literature and analyze the major institutional and regulatory features of the German financial system to establish a nexus between universal banking and stability. We focus on the following questions. First, which banks failed and did they because they were universal or because of other reasons? Second, which types of distress beside outright bank failures resulted from the crisis and how did German universal banks dealt with them? We show that only few German banks failed and these banks did so not because they were universal banks but because they were publicly owned. Most banks instead contributed to reduce the impact of the recent crisis.

No abstract

Financial integration, International banking, Capital regulation, Foreign direct investment, Incomplete contracts, G21, G28, F36, F23,

Banking crisis resolution is often a long-lasting process with large fiscal and social costs. We ask which difficulties authorities face when choosing and implementing resolution packages. We survey the literature analyzing the impact of single resolution instruments on moral hazard and fiscal costs. We argue that no best-practice resolution package exists and that the implementation of a package is subject to coordination failures. Since crisis resolution packages are countryspecific, we follow a case-study approach and describe how regulators in Japan and the Nordic countries during the 1990s solved their financial crises. We identify several obstacles the authorities in these countries were faced with and analyse their crisis resolution in the context of moral hazard and fiscal costs. Finally, we use these lessons to reassess the policy reactions in the US and in Europe during the recent financial crisis.Keywords Banking crisis Á Resolution instruments Á Lender of last resort Á Owner of last resort Á Political coase theorem