Are the major global banks now safer? Structural continuities and change in banking and finance since the 2008 crisis

Are the largest global banks now safer in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis? Focusing on a ‘before’ (2005) and ‘after’ (2015) balance sheet analysis of 21 of the largest American, British and European banks, we assess post-crisis banking performance. Much of the literature focuses on post-crisis regulation, but we argue instead that the main driver of change since the crisis has been structural conditions in banking and financial markets, particularly high levels of competition, bleak profit and share price conditions, and the largely unsolved too big to fail problem. Older as well as new forms of systemic risk thus prevail and many of the global banks still face major vulnerabilities.