Global Governance and Regulatory Failure / International Political Economy Series (PDF)

Roman Goldbach works for the Deutsche Bundesbank, Department of Banking and Financial Supervision. His research focuses on the policy implications of the globalization and financialization of political economies.

"Global Governance and Regulatory Failure stands out from the plethora of books on financial regulation and the global financial crisis not only for the author's thorough examination of the new transnational regulatory regime, but also for his innovative and critical analytical approach. The paradox of increasingly institutionalized transnational regulation is that it does not close "governance gaps" but creates new loopholes, leads to the watering down of proposed regulations, and increases the possibilities of multilayered regulatory conflict and arbitrage between key sets of actors transnational regulators, especially the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, national regulatory agencies, politicians and bureaucrats seeking to promote national competitiveness, and diverse, often competing, special interests in the financial sector. In other words, regulatory reform can itself be dysfunctional, increase moral hazard, and reduce regulators and governments to mopping up after crises rather than prevent-ing them i.e., regulatory failure. This book is a timely warning to both analysts and policymakers that the public good of financial stability may be farther away, not closer." - Philip G. Cerny, University of Manchester, UK, and Rutgers University, USA

"Roman Goldbach provides a rich and nuanced analysis of the interaction of transnational and national authorities over the past two decades that have combined to globalize - in a partial way - financial governance. Drawing on the most recent scholarship on financial governance, Goldbach outlines how the global layering of governance mechanisms generates incomplete, unreconciled and competing authority domains that sustain what he calls a durable global disorder. The financial crisis has revealed the depth of this disorder, and Goldbach insists that in order to confront this disorder we need to establish a sustainable form of accountability between transnational and national authorities. He has made a fine