Public good, collective action and financial regulation

The economy‐wide liberalization reforms implemented from the 1980s onwards in major capitalist economies had deep impact on financial markets. Public financial regulation has been replaced by self‐regulation, financial innovations proliferated and gave rise to many diversified and complex speculative operations that financialized most economic decisions and actions. Recurrent instabilities and crises became common ground in advanced as well as in emerging market economies and converged on the global systemic crisis in 2007–08, notwithstanding the efficient market doctrine that kept supporting financial liberalization. This crisis raised concerns about the relevance of market‐based financial regulation with regard to the systemic viability of capitalist economies and brought forward the central role of financial regulatory framework in the sustainable working of open societies. This article considers financial stability as a collective action problem through the lens of the literature on the commons and public goods. It seeks to contribute to the development of a relevant paradigm of collective action in the provision of a particular public good, financial stability, through a particular public action, financial regulation. After recalling the broad outlines of the evolution of financial markets and the institutional environment in the last decades, the monetary and financial characteristics of a capitalist economy are presented. The monetary and financial structure turns out to be a public infrastructure. The criticalness of financial transactions for the whole economic society together with the non‐rivalrousness and non‐excludability of financial stability determine the very publicness of the latter. The continuity of financial relations fundamentally needs a viable financial system. However, this is a complex issue as it falls into the classical opposition “private vs public” and calls for a collective action framework consistent with the characteristics of a financialized economy. This article argues that financial stability cannot be ensured through individual‐decision‐based market relations because of the endogenous limits of individual actions and the systemic nature of instabilities they can provoke. A specific treatment of finance as a public utility and of financial stability as a public good is then required. The study on the organization and management of financial markets, namely financial governance issue, ultimately leads to consider financial regulation as a collective action problem that calls for a public supervision framework through an extra‐market macroregulation, apt to allow economy to work in a viable way.