The United States dominates global investment banking: Does it matter for Europe?

Highlights For the full references and the annex, please see the PDF version of this publication. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the market share of US investment banks is increasing, while that of their European counterparts is declining. We present evidence that US investment banks are on the verge of taking over pole position in European investment banking. Meanwhile, since 2015, Chinese investment banks have overtaken American and European investment banks in the Asia Pacific market. Credit rating agencies and investment banks are the gatekeepers of the capital markets. The European supervisory institutions can effectively supervise the European operations of these US managed players. On the political side, we suggest that the European Commission should continue to view its, albeit declining, banking industry as a strategic sector. The Commission, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England should jointly develop a strategic agenda for the EU US Regulatory Dialogue. Finally, corporates rely on investment banks to issue new securities. We recommend that the big European corporates should cherish the (few) remaining European investment banks, by giving them at least one place in otherwise US dominated banking syndicates. That could help to avoid complete dependence on US investment banks. 1.  Europe's banks are in retreat from playing a global investment banking role. This should not be a surprise. It is an, often intended, consequence of the regulatory impositions of recent years, notably of the ring fencing requirements of the Vickers Report (2011) and the ban on proprietary trading by Liikanen (2012) but also including the enhanced capital requirements on trading books and other measures. The main concern is that a medium sized European country, such as the United Kingdom or Switzerland, or even a larger country like Germany, let alone a tiny country like Iceland or Ireland, would find a global investment bank to be too large and too dangerous to support, should it get into trouble1. So, one of the intentions of the new set of regulations was to rein back the scale of European investment banking to a more supportable level. The European Union, of course, has a much larger scale than its individual member countries. If the key issue is the relative scale of the global (investment) bank and state that might have to support it, could a Europe based global investment bank be possible2? We doubt it, primarily because the EU is not a state. It does not have sufficient fiscal competence. Even with the European banking union and European Stability Mechanism, the limits to the mutualisation of losses, eg via deposit insurance, mean that the bulk of the losses would still fall on the home country (Pisani Ferry and Wolff, 2012) Moreover, there would be intense rivalry over which country should be its home country, and concerns about state aid and the establishment of a monopolistic institution. While the further unification of the euro area might, in due course, allow a Europe based global investment bank to emerge endogenously, we do not expect it over the next half decade or so. So the withdrawal of European banks from a global investment banking role is likely to continue. That will leave the five US 'bulge bracket' banks, (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America Merrill Lynch) as the sole global investment banks left standing. The most likely result is a four tier investment banking system. The first tier will consist of these five US global giants. The second tier will consist of strong regional players, such as Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Rothschild in Europe and CITIC in the Asia Pacific region. HSBC is in between, with both European and Asia Pacific roots. The third tier consists of the national banks' investment banking arms. They will service (most of) the investment banking needs of their own corporates and public sector bodies, except in the case of the very biggest and most international institutions (which will want global support from the US banks) or in cases of complex, specialist advice. Examples of this third tier are Australian and Canadian banks, which support their own corporates and public sector bodies without extending into global investment banking. The fourth tier consists of small, specialist, advisory and wealth management boutiques. Why should it matter if in all the European countries, the local banks' investment banking activities should retrench to this more limited local role? After all, there are few claims that Australia and Canada have somehow lost out by not participating in global investment banking. We review the arguments in section 4. Before doing so, we take a closer look at the investment banking market in Europe. Section 2 investigates the development of the relative market shares of US and European investment banks over time. It appears that the US investment banks are about to surpass their European counterparts in the European investment banking market.