Beyond teaching, the ILF also conducts research work in corporate, securities and banking law. The ILF has two foundation professors and two research associates. The ILF research team prepares working papers and issues publications, particularly in the areas of German and international securities and company law, corporate finance, and banking law on a regular basis. In addition, we have in place an ILF Book Series which complies the lectures and presentations made at the various conferences held at the ILF.

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The Future of the Financial Sector Book Series

The Institute for Law and Finance is proud to announce the publication of the ninth book in its Future of the Financial Sector Book Series, "Green Banking and Green Central Banking: What are the right concepts?" Published to coincide with the COP26 conference in Glasgow, edited by Andreas Dombret and Patrick Kenadjian and published by De Gruyter, Berlin, it presents and expands on the proceedings of a day-long conference held by the ILF, with the support of our knowledge partner Oliver Wyman, on January 25, 2021, which reached an audience of over 1,000 on the topic of green banking and green central banking.

It contains the major address delivered by Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank on the subject of climate change and central banking and remarks by Jens Weidmann, President of the Deutsche Bundesbank on the role central bankers should play in combating climate change. Additional distinguished authors include senior policy makers, bankers and investors, among others CEOs Günther Bräunig of KfW Bankengruppe, Werner Hoyer of the EIB, Wiebe Draijer of Rabobank and Christian Sewing of Deutsche Bank and Jose Manuel Campa, Chair of the European Banking Authority, John Berrigan, Director General, DG FISMA at the European Commission and Jörg Kukies, State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Finance setting forth their views on the roles their institutions can play in combating climate change.

Each book in the series corresponds to a day long conference held by the ILF at which leading representatives from the public sector, industry and academia met to examine key issues of the day concerning the future of the financial sector. Together they trace the arc of our concerns for the sector following the Great Financial Crisis.

The first three volumes, as well as the seventh, concern themselves with the resolution of financial institutions, as well as other potential solutions to the "too big to fail" dilemma in the wake of the crisis, and show the remarkable progress we have made in Germany and in Europe on that topic. The first volume was based on a conference held in November 2010, a point at which the term bank resolution was so unfamiliar in Germany that we felt it best to call the conference "Brauchen wir ein Sonderinsolvenzrecht für Banken?", do we need a special insolvency law for banks. For the book, which appeared in 2012, we stuck in Too Big to Fail in the title. Contributors included Andreas Dombret, John Douglas, former General Counsel of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Thomas Huertas, member of the Executive Committee at the UK Financial Services Authority and Alternate Chair of the European Banking Authority (EBA), Martin Hellwig, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and Charles Randell, who was soon to become external member of the UK Prudential Regulation Committee and later Chair of the UK Financial Conduct Authority.

By May 2012 we were already able to discuss what was then being called the EU Crisis Management Directive, although the actual text itself had been delayed and was only published after the conference. By the time the book appeared in 2013 we were able to call it by its definitive name, the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive, and actually deal with the text itself. It was clear that by then resolution had been adopted by the EU as its preferred solution to too big to fail, although its complexities were still being sorted through, especially the topic of "living wills" and the then very controversial "bail-in tool". Contributors included Eva Hüpkes, advisor to the Financial Stability Board, Thomas Huertas, Charles Randell and Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

By January 2014 we were considering more radical proposals, as the recommendations of the Liikanen Commission joined the Volcker Rule and the conclusions of the Vickers Commission in the United Kingdom in pointing towards a variety of so-called structural reforms, separating various kinds of banking services. So we asked "Should We Break Up the Banks?" Contributors included Paul Achleitner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank, Jan Krahnen, member of the High level Expert Group on Structural Reforms of the EU Banking Sector and Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. At the end of the day, most contributors ended up advocating or conceding that, without a credible bank resolution system, structural proposals to break up the banks would not suffice to solve too big to fail.

We returned to the question of resolution in the spring of 2018 with our program entitled "Resolution in Europe: The Unresolved Questions", the fourth in our series on too big to fail, in which we narrowed our focus to Europe but broadened our scope to include insurance and central counterparties (CCPs). The book was published in 2019 with contributions by José Manuel Campa, the future Chair of the EBA, Benoît Cœuré, member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB), Adam Farkas, Executive Director of the EBA, Levin Holle, Director General, Financial Markets Policy Department, German Federal Ministry of Finance, Felix Hufeld, President of the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, Elke König, Chair of the Single Resolution Board, Steven Maijoor, Chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority, Fausto Parente, Executive Director of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and Sir Paul Tucker. The contributors concluded that significant progress had been made on bank resolution, although significant open issues remained, especially with respect to cross-border cases, but that less progress had been made on insurance and that CCP resolution required significant additional attention.

In March 2015 we turned our attention from the past to the future to consider the European Capital Markets Union in response to the European Commission’s Green Paper in a session where we questioned whether it was a viable concept and a real goal. The book appeared, in the same year, with contributions from Benoît Cœuré, Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability of the Bank of England, Philipp Hildebrand, Vice Chairman of BlackRock, Anshu Jain, Co-chief Executive Officer of Deutsche Bank and Wim Mijs, Chief Executive Officer of the European Banking Federation. There was a broad consensus on the desirability of the project, but considerable reservations on the tactics being pursued to accomplish it.

In November 2015 – 2015 was a busy year for us – we turned our attention back to one of the nagging questions left over from the Great Financial Crisis: to what extent was the crisis due to culture and could we hope to restore public confidence in financial institutions without tackling the issue of ethics. "Getting the Culture and the Ethics Right, Towards a New Age of Responsibility in Banking" appeared in 2016, with contributions from Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Chairman of Société Générale, John Cryan, Chief Executive Officer of Deutsche Bank, Georg Fahrenschon, President of the German Savings Banks Association, Douglas Flint, Group Chairman of HSBC Holdings, John Griffith-Jones, Chairman of the UK Financial Conduct Authority, Danièle Nouy, Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB Single Supervisory Mechanism, Jean-Claude Trichet, Chairman of the Group of Thirty, Sir Paul Tucker and Axel Weber, Chairman of the Board of UBS Group. There was unamimity among the contributors as to the importance of culture and ethics, but less clarity on whether the goals could best be reached through external pressure from regulation and supervision or bankers’ codes, or internally through boards of directors and structural changes.

We had intended to hold a conference in 2016 on the final Basel III accord, scheduled for finalization by year end. When the negotiations collapsed we pushed our session back to December 2017 and the book, "Basel III: Are We Done Now?" appeared in 2019 with contributions from Claudio Borio, Head of the Monetary and Economics Department, Bank for International Settlements, William Coen, Secretary General of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, Andrea Enria, Chairperson of the EBA, Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, Levin Holle, Stefan Ingves, Governor of the Swedish Riksbank and Chairman of the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, Sabine Lautenschläger, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, Christian Ossig, Chief Executive of the Association of German Banks, Isabel Schnabel, Member of the German Council of Economic Experts and Shunsuke Shirakawa, Vice Commissioner for International Affairs, Financial Services Agency of Japan, The contributors emphasized both the magnitude of the accomplishment Basel III represented and the issues which still remained to be resolved in the implementation of the accord as well as those items about which no agreement had been reached.

Finally, in 2019 we tackled the questions standing in the way of completing the European Banking Union. The book, entitled "EDIS, NPLs, Sovereign Debt and Safe Assets", appeared in 2020 with contributions by Andrea Enria, Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, Edouard Fernandez-Bollo, Secretary General, French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority, Martin Helling, Levin Holle, Dominique Laboureix, Director of Resolution Planning at the Single Resolution Board, Christian Ossig, Fabio Panetta, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, Isabel Schnael, Joachim Wuermeling, member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, Deputy Director in the Strategy and Policy Review Department at the International Monetary Fund.

The full list of the titles and contributors is set forth below. We are very grateful for all of them for the efforts they put into these volumes, which we hope have contributed to advancing thinking in Europe on the various topics we covered.

 

Institute for Law and Finance Series; Titles on the Future of the Financial Sector

Authors: Dirk H. Bliesener, Andreas Dombret, John L. Douglas, Martin Hellwig, Thomas F. Huertas, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Wolfgang M. Nardi, Klaus Pannen, Carl Pickerill, Leo Plank, Matthias Raphael Prause, Wolfgang M. Nardi, Charles Randell, Christoph Thole.

Authors: Andreas Cahn, Dirk H. Bliesener, Andreas Dombret, Randall D. Guynn, Thomas F. Huertas, Eva Hüpkes, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Simon Gleeson, Mathias Otto, Charles Randell, Paul Tucker.

Should We Break Up the Banks? Ed. Andreas Dombret and Patrick S. Kenadjian, De Gruyter Recht Berlin (2015)

Authors: Paul Achleitner, Andreas Dombret, Douglas J. Elliott, Simon Gleeson, Randall D. Guynn, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Jan P. Krahnen, Adam S. Posen, Miguel de la Mano, Debra Stone.

A viable concept and a real goal? Ed. Andreas Dombret and Patrick S. Kenadjian, De Gruyter Recht Berlin (2015)

Authors: Cyrus Ardalan, Andrew Bosomworth, Benoît Cœuré, Sir Jon Cunliffe, Andreas Dombret, Alexandra Hachmeister, Philipp Hildebrand, Anshu Jain, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Wim Mijs, Christian Ossig, Dirk Schoenmaker.

Towards a New Age of Responsibility in Banking and Finance, Ed. Patrick S. Kenadjian and Andreas Dombret, De Gruyter Recht, Berlin (2016)

Authors: Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, John Cryan, Andreas Dombret, Georg Fahrenschon, Leonhard H. Fischer, Douglas Flint, Simon Gleeson, John Griffith-Jones, Klaus J. Hopt, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Jan P. Krahnen, Sylvie Matherat, Wim Mijs, Alberto G. Musalem, Danièle Nouy, Dominik Treeck, Jean-Claude Trichet, Sir Paul Tucker, Axel A. Weber.

Authors: Claudio Borio, William Coen, Andreas Dombret, Douglas J. Elliott, Andrea Enria, Michael S. Gibson, C.A.E. Goodhart, Stuart Graham, Paul Hilbers, Levin Holle, Stefan Ingves, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Sabine Lautenschläger, Laurie Mayers, Martin Merlin, Sandie O’Connor, Christian Ossig, Shunsuke Shirakawa, Isabel Schnabel.

Authors: José Manuel Campa, Benoît Cœuré, Andreas Dombret, Wilson Ervin, Joachim Faber, Adam Farkas, Helmut Gründl, Levin Holle, Thomas F. Huertas, Felix Hufeld, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Elke König, Daniel Maguire, Steven Maijoor, Fausto Parente, Giulio Terzariol, Sir Paul Tucker, Mark E. Van Der Weide, James von Moltke.

Authors: Klaus Adam, Roland Boekhout, Thiess Büttner, Rebecca Christie, Andreas Dombret, Colin Ellis, Andrea Enria, Edouard Fernandez-Bollo, Martin Hellwig, Joachim Hennrichs, Georg Huber, Thomas F. Huertas, Patrick S. Kenadjian, Nikki Kersten, Slawek Kozdras, Jan P. Krahnen, Dominique Laboureix, Álvaro Leandro, Nicoletta Mascher, Sylvie Matherat, Wim Mijs, Arthur J. Murton, Charles Nysten, Christian Ossig, Fabio Panetta, Jörg Rocholl, Karl-Peter Schackmann-Fallis, Isabel Schnabel, Anita van den Ende, Nicolas Véron, Klaus Wiedner, Joachim Wuermeling, Jeromin Zettelmeyer.

Authors: John Berrigan, Jean Boivin, Guenther Braeunig, Jose Manuel Campa, Andreas Dombret, Wiebe Draijer, Christian Edelmann, Ed Fishwick, Sylvie Goulard, Philipp Hildebrand, Werner Hoyer, Otmar Issing, Patrick Kenadjian, Mathias Kopp, Christine Lagarde, Valentin von Massov, Wim Mijs, Daniel Mminele, Ted Moynihan, Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, Sirpa Pietikainen, Christian Sewing, Jessica Tan, Guenther Thallinger, Bouke de Vries, Jens Weidmann