National implications of EU harmonization - The case of banks' reporting requirements in Sweden

• The purpose of this paper is to discuss how internationally formulated policies and regulation of banks affect national supervisory practices and what consequences this may have on the form and quality of banking supervision conducted on the national level. Using the case of Swedish banks’ reporting requirements, we argue that the last decade of EU level regulatory reforms are motivated by a different “regulatory agreement” (Young 2016) than the Swedish one. In the decade since the global financial crisis 2007-2009, banking regulation reforms appear to be shaped by a view that all financial institutions are more or less immoral and cannot be trusted to self-regulate. The development can be characterized as a move from a dialogue based relationship between the supervisor and the supervised (Roberts, 2009) and being based on fairly high levels of trust (Tomkins, 2001), to a more quantitative and centralized supervision based on collection and comparison of large amounts of standardized quantitative data. We argue that Swedish financial regulation and supervision traditionally were based on the notion of dialogue and mutual trust and less on extensive reporting requirements. Thus, for Sweden to conform to the post-crisis international regulatory framework, this means abandoning what appears to be a fairly well-functioning national arrangement.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Juridik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Law (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

ovr (subject category)