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The Rosetta Stone of Banking Regulation: The Law of International Banking Institutions Armin J. Kummel (Vienna: Mille Tre, 2005)
Although hanking has gone global, hanking regulation is still primarily local. A large money center hank in New York is just as likely to do business with an Austrian bank as one headquartered in California. However, even though each of the New York and Austrian banks engages in business banking, their chartering and regulations are still controlled by their local regulators. A failure to appreciate the differences between a bank chartered and regulated by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency versus the Austrian Financial Market Authority can result in misunderstandings, lost business and perhaps civil or criminal liability.
As bankers and regulators struggle to understand competing banking systems, they often find themselves in the same position as the philologist or archeologisl studying Egyptian hieroglyphics prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.1 For hundreds of years, the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphics had been lost. The ancient written language only became decipherable after discovery of the stone. In 1799, French soldiers discovered the Rosetta stone while strengthening a fort near el Rashid (Rosetta). The text of the stone is itself not remarkable. However, the lexl was repealed in three languages: Greek, démolie script and Egyptian hieroglyphics. By comparing the hieroglyphics side by side with Greek, scholars were finally able to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Kammer s book on international banking does much the same work for bankers as the Rosetta Stone did for philologists. Although I have a thorough understanding of U.S. banking law, other banking systems such as those described in Kammel's book are Greek (or should I say Egyptian hieroglyphics) to me. Kammel's book equips the reader with the ability to compare banking regulation and financial disclosure across different countries' borders.
Kummel is uniquely qualified to write a book on international banking. Kummel brings into play the analytical skills and analysis he developed as a doctoral student at the University of Graz in Austria. Kummel was also a practicing international banking lawyer. Many comparative law pieces are written by academics without such experience and often inadvertently focus on aspects that hold no interest or importance for practitioners. Finally, Kammel has had...