Lo scorso 26 marzo, presso la sede dell’Università degli Studi “Link Campus” di Roma, si è tenuto il Convegno “Corporate Governance and fi-nancial markets: pictures from the post-crisis era”. Il Convegno ha segnato l’avvio del progetto di ricerca su “Corporate Go-vernance and Financial Markets: A Post-Crisis Analysis”, che prevede una ricerca congiunta, di durata biennale, tra la Link Campus, attraverso il CER-SIG – Centro di Ricerca sulle Scienze Giuridiche e la Queen Mary University of London, attraverso il Centre for Commercial Law Studies, con la collabo-razione e il finanziamento di Deloitte STS. Principal Investigators del progetto di ricerca sono: Rodrigo Olivares-Caminal (Queen Mary), Oreste Cagnasso, Pierluigi Matera, Ferruccio M. Sbarbaro (Link Campus), Roberto Rocchi (Deloitte). La prima parte delle relazioni al Convegno viene pubblicata di seguito; la seconda parte verrà pubblicata successivamente, sempre su questa Rivista.

During the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 [1], many banks' regulators and supervisors across the world realized that they lacked proper tools enabling them to intervene and orderly resolve insolvent banks without resorting to public money. As a consequence, in order to rescue several banking institutions, which were severely affected – directly or indirectly – by the US subprime mortgage crisis, many States had to employ an incredible amount of public money [2]. Such a kind of public intervention, a phenomenon that has been characterized as the rescue of failing bank by using taxpayers' money, is commonly known as ‘bail-out' [3]. Obviously this rescuing strategy has caused the public finance of these States to significantly deteriorate [4] due to a proportional increase of their public debt [5]. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, in order to tackle the lack of coordination among Supervisors of different jurisdictions as well as the shortcomings of the legal framework, the Financial Stability Board has started making significant efforts in drafting general guidelines aimed at harmonizing and fostering the regulations of all the main jurisdictions across the world. Such an effort has been, since the beginning, precisely aimed at stopping the use of public money to rescue insolvent banks [6]. But it can also be seen as the policy-makers' response to the lack of effective legal tools for bank restructuring [7] which was evidenced by the global financial crisis [8]. The most important initiative taken by the Financial Stability Board in this context is evidenced by the so-called ‘Key Attributes of Effective Resolution Regimes for Financial Institutions', that have been published in October 2011 [9]. With this document, the Financial Stability Board has introduced a number of principles as well as new legal mechanisms which aim to ‘resolve financial institutions in an orderly manner without taxpayer exposure to loss from solvency support, while maintaining continuity of their vital economic functions' [10]. The main Financial Stability Board's purpose, therefore, has been to draft some guidelines concerning new legal tools and principles to be then transposed in the main jurisdictions worldwide [11] with a view to orderly resolving banks in crisis without impacting public finances, also in light of the fact that the use of public money can increase moral hazard [12]. The most challenging difficulty, however, is that in using the new tools to resolve banks, the authorities should also avoid to create «severe systemic disruption» [13]. From a practical point of view, this means that the twofold aim of the authorities in effectively managing banking crises is, on one side, to avoid financial instability, and on the other side, to protect public finances. It follows that a bank in crisis can only be rescued without [continua..]