The recent news

The European Banking Union is based on supervision as much as on regulation: it concerns the operators as much as the structures of the sector, because the operators "hold" the sector.

This is why the "regulator - supervisor" holds the operators by the supervision and is close to them.

He meets them officially and in "soft law" relations. This is all the more necessary since the distinction between the Ex Ante and the Ex Post must be nuanced, in that its application is too rigid, in that it involves a long time (first of all the rules, then to apply them, then to notice a gap between rules and behaviors, then to repair it) is not appropriate if the system aims at the prevention of systemic crises, whose source is inside the operators.

This is why the body in charge of solving the difficulties of the systemic banks for the salvation of the systeme meets the banking sector itself, to ensure that they are permanently "resolvable", so that the hypothesis of their resolution never arises. This is the challenge of this system: that it is always ready, for never be applying.

____

In the European Banking Union, the Single Resolution Board (SRB) is in charge of "resolve" the difficulties of European systemic banks in difficulty. It is the public body of the second pillar of the Banking Union. The first pillar is the prevention of these difficulties and the third is the guarantee of deposits. The resolution is therefore more like an Ex Post mechanism.

But in this continuum through these three pillars between the Ex Ante and the Ex Post, the SRB does not wait passively - as would a traditional judge do - that the file of the troubled bank reaches it. Like a supervisor - which brings it closer to the first public in the system (Single Supervisory Board -SSB), which supervises all the banks, it is in direct contact with all the banks, and it approaches the hypothesis of a bank in trouble by a systemic perspective: it is therefore to the entire banking system that the SRB addresses itself.

As such, it organizes meetings, where he is located: in Brussels.

Thus, on June 18, 2019, all banks came to discuss with the Single Resolution Board to know what it wants from the banks and for the banks, in what is called a "dialogue meeting".

To resolve in Ex Post the difficulties of a bank, it has to present a quality (a little known concept in Bankruptcy Law): "resolvability". How build it? Who build it ? In its very design and in its application, bank by bank.

For the resolution body vis-à-vis all players in the banking and financial sector, it's clear: "Working together" is crucial in building resolvability ".

In the projection that is made, it is affirmed that there can be a successful resolution only if the operator in difficulty is not deprived of access to what makes to stay it alive, that is to say the banking and financial system itself, and more specifically the "Financial Market Infrastructures", for example payment services.

Does the Single Resolution Board expect spontaneous commitments from the FMIs for such a "right of access"? In this case, as the Single Resolution Board says, this right of access corresponds to "critical functions" for a bank, the resolution situation can not justify the closure of the service.

By nature, these crucial operators are entities that report to regulators who oversee them. Who enforces - and immediately - this right of access? When one can think that it is everyone, it risks being nobody .... That is why the resolution body, relaying in this a concern of the Financial Stability Board, underlines that it is necessary to articulate the supervisors, regulators and "resolvers" between them.

_____

To read this program, since it is a proposed program of work for the banking sector, four observations can be made:

1. We are moving more and more towards a general "intermaillage" (which will perhaps replace the absence of a global State, but it is an similar nature because it is always to public authorities that it refers and not to self-regulation);

2. But as there is no political authority to keep these guardians, the entities that articulate all these various public structures, with different functions, located in different countries, acting according to different temporalities, these are the companies themselves that internalize the concern that animates those who built the system: here the prevention of systemic risk. This is the definition of Compliance, which brings back to companies, here more clearly those those which manage the Market Infrastructures, the obligations of Compliance (here the management of systemic risk through the obligation of giving access).

3. Even without a  single systemic guard, there is always a recourse. That will be the judge. There are already many, there will probably be more in a system of this type, more and more complex, the articulation of disputes is sometimes called "dialogue". And it is undoubtedly "decisions of principle" that will set the principles common to all of these particular organisms.

4. We then see the emergence of Ex Ante mechanisms for the solidity of the systems, and the solidity of the players in the systems, and then the Ex Post resolution of the difficulties of the actors according to access to the solidity of the infrastructures of these systems, which ultimately depend on judges (throughout the West) facing areas where all of this depends much less on the judge: the rest of the world.

____