The shift in foreign bank activities Unfortunately, neither the Basel Committee nor national regulators responded in a timely fashion to the magnitude of the expansion in scale and scope of the world’s largest banking organizations in the roughly 15 years before the financial crisis.
As illustrated in figure 1, at the end of 1974, just before the Basel Committee was created, the assets of the world’s 10 largest banking organizations together equaled about 8 percent of global GDP. The three largest were all American – BankAmerica, Citicorp, and Chase Manhattan.