Internationalization of banks and its influence on economic develop-ment and stability

Financialization process was accompanied by many phenomena and processes occurring in individual domestic economies, as well as on the supranational level. Some of them rein-forced additionally financialization tendencies whereas the other were stimulated and ag-gravated by those very tendencies. Precise evaluation of causality is hardly possible here, nevertheless, one may point at most strict connection between financialization – its develop-ment, dynamics or scale – and such processes like, for instance, globalization, deregulation, liberalization, changes of forms and types of money and internationalization of financial insti-tutions The aim of the paper is to characterize, also in the context of the Global Financial Cri-sis of 2007, features and consequences of banking systems internationalization and to draw some insights on its potential influence on stability of financial systems and economic per-formance. First, there are presented definitions and main features of internationalization processes. Then, chronology of internationalization, with reference to progress in globaliza-tion and financialization, is described. After that there is presented survey of existing studies on internationalization and its consequences for different agents involved, as well as for whole economies – both the home countries of multinational banks and economies of host countries .