The International Campaign to Create Ethical Bankers

The substance of international financial regulation has been created through informal standard setting among regulators acting through networks. This standard setting has frequently been concrete and specific, as the evolving international bank capital rules exemplify. But banking supervisors have recently turned their focus towards the creation of a global set of ethical standards for bankers, only vaguely defined at best. Regulators have emphasized the importance of ‘culture’ set by a ‘tone at the top’, though they have not yet explained what is required by the terms. This new focus of international financial regulation epitomizes the irreducibly informal nature of multinational standard setting, even in a global regime that has tried for precision. It also represents a commitment by financial regulators to cosmopolitanism: the effort to create consistent global ethical standards for financial institutions assumes away differences in industry structure and national cultures in the service of a vision of a consistent financial regulatory regime applied to banks and non-bank financial firms across the world.