From failure to failure: The politics of international banking regulation

It is now clear that Basel III, a much discussed set of proposals to govern the international banking system drawn up by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, has fallen far short of its creators’ aims. Even more puzzlingly, this is not without precedent. Eleven years ago, partly in response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Basel Committee attempted to overhaul global banking rules in order to enhance the stability of the global financial system. The culmination of its five-year efforts, the Basel II Accord, was abandoned by regulators before ever being fully implemented. In this paper, I ask why Basel II failed to meet the Basel Committee's original objectives and why Basel III has met a similar fate. Drawing on recent work on the politics of global regulation, I present a theoretical framework which emphasizes the importance of timing and sequencing in determining the outcome of rule-making in global finance. The success of this framework in explaining the failure of Basel II and Basel III is an invitation to scholars in the field of International Relations to take ‘time’ seriously as an analytical variable.