ABSTRACT
At the June 2007 G8 summit in Heiligendamm, two months before the current global financial crisis began, the German government strenuously tried to make the issue of global financial regulation one of the major topics to be discussed by world leaders. However, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “sherpa” for the summit, Bernd Pfaffenbach, admitted defeat beforehand: “We mentioned the topic already in 2005 during the Gleneagles summit – and we ran against a wall. This time the US and the UK … are at least willing to talk about the topic … [But] we won’t score big” (SZ 2007; own translation). And indeed, the summit generated no tangible results on this issue. The same had happenedwhenGermany attempted to push the issue during its contemporaneous EU presidency at the European level (Buck and Parker 2007). These efforts were part of a rather inconsistent but fairly continuous stream of initiatives urging the closer regulation of financial markets which had been proposed by German government officials since the mid-1990s. The Merkel Government has been conspicuously productive in this respect. It has argued in various international and European settings for tighter rules on hedge funds and private equity investors, a fundamental reform of the operations of rating agencies, defensive measures against sovereign wealth funds, stricter capital standards for banks, rules on the pay of CEO’s and other highly-paid executives in the finance industry, and so on.
