Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses the advantages and flaws of current reforms and tries to come up with practical proposals. It refers to a comparative approach, mostly comparing EU reform with UK and US legislative reforms on the structural problem. The book also analyses the major causes of the Too big to fail (TBTF) bank structural problem. It focuses on how behavioural factors can influence the assessment of current EU reforms. The book discusses that price-based measures could be helpful in dealing with the structural problems of the banking industry, but would not affect the behavioural aspects of it, and hence would be unable to avoid a recurrence of the systemic risk. It analyses the EU Bank Structural Regulation (BSR) and answers whether it can attain the second reform purpose, financial efficiency, through another approach, the cost benefit analysis (CBA).