Abstract

From roughly 1988 to 2007, global banks faced strong regulatory incentives to lend to members of the OECD and those of the IMF’s General Arrangements to Borrow (GAB), along with disincentives to lend to countries that belonged to neither of these groups. The culprit was the Basel Accord, also known as Basel I, a piece of banking regulation designed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) to regulate global banks’ capital levels. Why did the BCBS create a ‘club’ of riskless sovereign borrowers, and why did it use OECD and GAB membership to do so? Relying on the archives of the BCBS, I first argue that the Basel Committee chose to design a club in response to European Community (EC) policies, which threatened a number of non-EC states on the Committee. Second, I argue that the BCBS chose to define the group through OECD membership because its members embodied a key set of criteria that it associated with creditworthiness. I conclude by outlining the implications of these findings for our understanding of the BCBS, as well as for our models of how central banks construct international hierarchies.

摘要

大约从 1988 年到 2007 年，全球银行面临着向经合组织成员国和国际货币基金组织借款总安排 (GAB) 成员国放贷的强烈监管激励，以及向不属于这两个集团的国家放贷的不利因素。罪魁祸首是巴塞尔协议，也称为巴塞尔协议 I，这是由巴塞尔银行监管委员会 (BCBS) 设计的一项银行监管，旨在规范全球银行的资本水平。为什么 BCBS 创建了一个无风险主权借款人“俱乐部”，为什么它使用 OECD 和 GAB 成员身份来这样做？依靠 BCBS 的档案，我首先论证巴塞尔委员会选择设计一个俱乐部是为了响应欧洲共同体 (EC) 的政策，该政策威胁到委员会中的一些非 EC 国家。第二，我认为 BCBS 选择通过经合组织成员身份来定义该组，因为其成员体现了一套与信誉相关的关键标准。最后，我概述了这些发现对我们理解 BCBS 以及中央银行如何构建国际等级制度的模型的影响。