>so, let me get this right: by 'bank-centred systems' you mean what? a
>central govt bank? the US does not have a central govt bank, ever had?
>only treasury? is this what you see as the key or rather that in
>combination with (as the astract alluded to) the degree of connection
>between ownership and control, the extent of public enterprises (i was
>unclear about which of these was being referred to or highlighted)?
Bank-centered means that banks hold large amounts of corporate stock, exerting effective control, rather than dispersed stockholders like pension funds, mutual funds, and rich individuals. In bank-centered systems, stock markets tend to be small (relative to GDP), trading volume relatively low, and there's no "liquid market for corporate control" (an active takeover market). In stock-centered systems - of which the U.S. is the paradigm (Brits like to call it an Anglo-American system, but British industry never fully made the transition to the joint-stock large corporation model, keeping a lot of family and privately held firms of smallish size) - firms are under minute-by-minute scrutiny and great pressure to maximize profits. If they fall out of favor with Wall Street, institutional shareholders will complain, and if the stock price is chronically low, that exposes the firm to the risk of hostile takeover. In a bank-centered system (of which Germany is the paradigm), those pressures don't exist; trading is sleepy, corporate disclosure is fairly minimal (lots of German firms don't publish quarterly financial results), and the possibility of hostile takeovers is close to zero. German corporate boards have heavy union representation on them, and the capital-labor relation is more corporatist than confrontational. Not that there's much confrontation in the U.S., capital having largely won the class struggle for now.
Germany and the other continental European countries with bank-centered systems are evolving in the stock direction, and the creation of the euro will almost certainly promote this. But I don't want to play Hilferding, who declared the Anglo-American system obsolete and the world moving in a German direction.
Doug