Aspects économiques du droit de la concurrence appliqué aux activités bancaires

This paper starts by reviewing the recent literature on antitrust laws in banking from the perspective of general economic analysis. We focus on the US experience for didactic reasons and as a background against which the Swiss case is discussed further on. After an introductory section, we examine some facts about the process of bank expansion, concentration and mergers in the US during the 1980s and 1990s, and then turn to the driving forces as well as the economic concepts used in assessing possible anticompetitive effects. A third section focuses on the origins and development of the legal framework of banking and competition policy. A brief fourth section summarizes the conclusions and lessons to be derived from the American experience. Finally, in a fifth section, we offer some reflections on the case of Switzerland, which appears to be the mirror image of the US as far as the legal, institutional and empirical aspects of the current situation are concerned. The paper concludes by expressing our confidence that future Swiss competition policy and antitrust legislation in banking will largely benefit from the economic knowledge accumulated on the subject, such as that pertaining to the US case.