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Following the financial crisis, the United Kingdom introduced major structural reforms to address concern about Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) banks, while France and Germany adopted much weaker reforms. This is puzzling given the presence of large universal banks engaged in market making activities in all three countries, which suffered significant losses during the international financial crisis, and given the commitments to reform made by political leaders in all three countries. The paper explains this policy divergence by analysing how dynamics of agenda setting contributed to the emergence of policy windows on structural reform. We explain the United Kingdom's decision to delegate the process to an independent commission as an example of venue shifting which helped to insulate the process from industry framing, and resulted in "conflict expansion" by mobilizing a wider coalition of actors in support of bank ringfencing. By contrast, in France and Germany the agenda was tightly managed through existing institutional venues, enabling industry to resist the framing of the issue around TBTF and limiting the role of non-business groups—a process we label as "conflict contraction." We argue that analysis of agenda setting dynamics provides new insights into the cross-national variability of business power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the Single Market in the EU - and the extension of its principles to the EEA - has led to dangerous trends in bank regulation as there is a 'disconnect' between regulation and deposit insurance systems. Although these problems do not exist in insurance markets to any great extent, Single Market regulation gives rise to other problems in that sector. In particular, it is restricting free trade both within and between countries. We propose a radical new model that would promote free trade without centralisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]