Twenty papers, presented by Alexander (law and finance, U. of Zurich, Switzerland) and Dhumale (managing director of risk control at UBS, UK), take stock of how international financial markets and institutions have changed over the past three decades and analyze the role of law and regulation in responding to those changes. A key theme of the volume is that law and regulation have not responded adequately to changes in the financial markets, allowing private parties to reap great profits from private risk-taking while socializing the losses. The contributions are presented in five sections that analyze the changing structure of global financial markets involving the disintermediation of banks and how regulatory failure sowed the seeds of the global credit and financial crisis; bank capital adequacy regulation and its effect on bank behavior, together with the risk measurement approaches under Basel I and II and the challenges they pose for bank governance and regulation; the inter-relationship between European institutions and the growing integration of European financial markets; central clearing of derivatives; and the interaction between regulatory institutions and markets and the determinants of the institutional design of financial supervision and international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)