Abstract

Systemic Supervision

The European Systemic Risk Board as an Example of a Structurally New Type of Supervision

In response to the 2007/2008 financial crisis the European system of financial supervision has been substantially reformed. As part of these reforms the “European Systemic Risk Board” (ESRB) has been installed and assigned the task of preventing systemic risks to financial stability in the Union. This marks a fundamental change in the strategy and perspective of financial supervision: So far, supervision of financial markets on the national as well as the European level has almost exclusively been micro-prudential, focusing on individual market participants and the risks caused by them as individual financial institutions. The ESRB, on the contrary, is supposed to provide macro-prudential supervision and oversee the financial system as a whole so as to be able to detect and prevent systemic risks that emerge from the interplay of different actors and components within the system.

In this article I analyse the ESRB's institutional design by asking whether it adequately reflects the macro-prudential task and the specific nature of emergent risk. I propose to conceptualise the ESRB as an example of a new type of supervision – systemic supervision (“Systemaufsicht”) –, and I examine the structure of systemic supervision as distinct from traditional supervisory regimes that necessitates discrete organizational forms, procedures, and instruments.