Conclusion

This book has shown that the nature of bank behaviour and financial system resilience within and among LMEs and CMEs and the institutional outcomes cannot be understood from the types of financial systems, whether bank-based or capital market-based; the types of policy networks that dominate the national financial services industries; or whether states have a strong (proactive) or weak (reactive) capacities in financial services. Instead, I have argued that bank behaviour and resilience, and institutional change and persistence can be understood by reference to interdependent processes among multiple structures, institutions and agents. I showed that several structural and institutional complementarities and agency-level enabling conditions reinforcing conservative bank behaviour prevailed in Australia, Canada and Japan whilst contradictory factors reinforcing opportunistic behaviour prevailed in the US, UK and Germany.