Mutation financière : Les déterminants structurels de la mutation financière récente
Authors: Delmas-Marsalet Jacques 
Published: April 2013

Changes in Financial Systems and Determining Factors

The financial system of industrial countries is experiencing rapid changes of a great magnitude: reduction in credit intermediation, growing diversification of financial instruments, opening and integration of markets, despecialization of intermediaries.

The determinants of these changes are to be inquired into in the adaptation of economic forces to a new economic and technological deal. The behavioral changes induced by this new deal are in their turn factors in an evolutionary dynamic.

The last decade has been characterized by mounting financial deficits, by appeals for credit and above all to capital markets:

- on the world plane with the deficit of developing countries financed by credit banks and more recently that of the USA financed by appeal to the market;

- on the internal plane with the level attained by the public deficits, even if a reflux is perceptible today.

Coincidentally, the aggravation of uncertainties in inflation in the interest rate and in the exchange rate has stimulated an important movement of financial innovations.

Finally, the rise of information and communications, then micro-informational systems, considerably widening the range of possibilities, has upset the instruments and methods of financial middlemen.

The adjustment policies of followed for remedying the crisis have lead to an increase in real interest rates and a modification of the value added to the profit of enterprises and have certain detrimental characteristics.

The enterprises have tended to remove their debt and to mange more efficiently their treasury and their debt in appealing to all the possibilities offered by the markets.

The characteristics have diminished their savings rate and modified the orientation of their investments in favour of producing better returns, permitting the rapid development of forms of collective management of savings.

Confronted with the weakening of credit demand by enterprises and by the diminution in volume and by the increase in the cost of their deposits, the commercial banks have developed their market activities to serve enterprises as well as their management activities for individual or collective portfolios.

Competition in the internal banking system is in the large sense spreading within, while the diversification of activities is widening the frontiers.

The banks are equally forced to reduce their costs of intermediation to limit the risks inherent in their activity, by the utilization of new products and by mobilization. This movement nevertheless finds its limits in the rapid development of off-balance sheet activity.

In this context, the public authorities have been constrained or desirious of deregulating to assure the equality of competitive conditions between financial intermediaries, and to favour the decrease of the cost of financial intermediation and the competitiveness of national financial positions.

Nevertheless, a re-regulation seems inescapable in order to recover control of monetary policy and to continue to assure the stability of the financial system and the protection of savers.

In this respect, the project of a European market of financial services must rest at once on the progressive liberalization and equilibrium and on common rules of the game.

The free circulation of financial producers must be accompanied by a minimal harmonization of rules of surveillance and by prudent standards: the security of the financial system is at stake.