Towards a Restructuring of the International Financial Services Industry: Some Preliminary Empirical and Theoretical Insights

For the past two or three years financial magazines have regularly made their front pages with news of spectacular takeovers, merger talks and strategic moves in the financial sector, especially in commercial and investment banking and in insurance. Such a succession of events clearly tells us that the financial services industry is in the throes of a majorb worldwide restructuring, which will undoubtedly gather momentum after the October 1987 crash. This movement has been especially strong in the United States with the rapid rise of some ‘super regional’ banks like Wells Fargo, after it bought out Crocker National, or with the new landscale in Wall Street following the merger of Shearson Lehman and E. F. Hutton. Foreigners also played their role in these transformations, particularly the Japanese banks and insurance companies that took stakes in some of the most prominent investment banks, such as Sumitomo Bank in Goldman Sachs; they also acquired some retail banks, especially in California and infused capital into the ailing Bank of America. In Europe some recent events — like the Société Générale de Belgique affair — point in the same direction.