Alen Stojanović

Macroprudential Regulation and Financial Sector Stability in Surroundings of Financial Crisis: Case of Croatia

Financial sector stability is a key prerequisite for efficient transfer and allocation of savings, considered to be one of foundations of economic growth. The importance of achieving and sustaining financial stability has be highlighted by recent financial crisis which has revealed that the financial sector has a single core with strong mutual influences and spill-over effects. The importance of supervising the whole financial sector, instead of focusing only on supervising single institutions, has been emphasised by new regulatory changes in the European Union and the USA. These changes have led to development of macroprudential supervision with the aim to ensure sustainable stability of the financial sector. In previous years, regulators and supervisors were focused on the microprudential supervision of individual financial institutions and did not adequately monitor the macro-systemic risks in the domestic and global financial market. The purpose of this article is to give an overview on research in the field of macroprudential regulation and analyse new legislative proposals for macroprudential regulation in the EU and the USA. The article will examine macroprudential policy in Croatia and its impact on financial sector stability in surroundings of financial crisis.

Bank consolidation: significance, valuation and consequences

The growth of efficiency and profitability are basic goals of every bank management. The prevailed opinion is that these aims can be realised through the growth in scale and scope of their business operations. This growth can be internal – by increasing the scope and the number of own activities, or external – by taking over or acquiring business activities of other companies. The latter form of growth, consolidation or conglomeration, is becoming more and more important. The purpose of this paper is to point to the main causes, motives and characteristics of banking conglomeration, a phenomenon that has prevailed in developed financial systems and has growing importance in transition and other less-developed countries.