Crise systémique et régulation financière[Systemic crisis and financial regulation]

One of the privileged explanations of the current crisis is the sophistication and the weak transparency of financial markets which would have allowed speculative behavior to elude authorities’ supervision. This article develops a different view by putting the emphasis on the model of organization of financial systems. This is established on the predominance of micro-prudential supervision schemes following the hypothesis of free market efficiency. From 1980-90, prudential mechanisms have worked in favor of self-regulation models and the systemic stability is mainly founded on the individual security of banking institutions. We show that this orientation suffers from the fallacy of composition; the micro-prudential model turns out to be unsuitable for the management of systemic risks because of the absence of an automatic bridge between the micro and the macroeconomic levels. The new regulatory environment feeds then successive bubbles the recurrence of which seems to require a modification of the rules of organization to avoid the forced socialization of the losses of private actors.