Do national financial systems still reflect national values? The case of the United States, Germany, and France

Abstract

An increasing awareness of the embeddedness of national institutions in deeper layers of values can be discerned. However, in the meantime, internationalization and globalization have led to a dominance of international and thus common standards. Consequently, the chances are high that national influences are trumped by international ones. This certainly seems to hold for financial systems as these are designed according to international agreements. This chapter describes the evolution of the financial systems in the United States, Germany, and France with a view to investigating whether these systems still resemble the national characteristics which were so obvious during the first decades after the Second World War. It appears that some subsectors of the financial systems, such as the financing of residential housing, still reflect differences in national cultures.