Looking at the technologies that underlie some of the recent innovative financial products, we see a move toward decentralization—that is, a movement toward technologies that connect financial market participants directly without an intermediary.
In particular, many banks – including the EU ones – applied the new Basel II capital rules for the first time in 2008. Consequently, we still have only a restricted knowledge, based on real data, of how Basel II works in practice. And, most notably, we cannot blame Basel II for the recent financial crisis.