This outstanding book offers a new approach to the legal issues raised by the drive for convergence in securities regulation. The author offers a deeply informed and insightful examination of the implications for regulatory and policy design if regulatory convergence were to be rigorously implemented. After setting the development of the idea of regulatory convergence in historical context and defining what the term means, she goes on to investigate the web of legal issues surrounding the concept and its implementation, including the following:
- the benefits and drawbacks of the existing regulatory competition between Member States;
- ground-up (waiting for divergences to evolve through competitive processes) versus top-down mandatory convergence;
- regulation of intermediaries;
- financial market transparency (visibility of pre-trade and post-trade information);
- financial market concentration (whether there should be centralization of trades on particular large markets);
- enforcement against market abuse;
- multilateral trading facilities (MTFs);
- pan-European exchange alliances such as Euronext and the OMX;
- theories on multi-speed clustering among like-minded Member States;
- the role of the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR); and
- the relationship of national penalties and enforcement convergence.
Although many authorities recognize that there are insufficient systemic features in the current framework to achieve regulatory convergence in EU securities regulation, this book takes a giant step beyond procedural discussion into a deep analysis of the underlying need for legal integrity in this administrative field at theEU level if policy objectives are to be achieved or even clearly argued. It will be of great interest to practitioners and policymakers working in securities, competition, and related fields.