Safe Bank

The debate regarding imposing additional financial burdens on economic entities after the 2007–2009 financial crisis resulted in the decision to impose additional fiscal burdens on banks in most European countries. A tax on financial transactions was a popular solution and banking tax was also used, charging different components of the banking institution’s balance sheet, depending on the country. Most countries introduced taxation on liabilities to create an additional stabilization fund in the event of a crisis. After three years of operation of the banking tax in Poland encumbering assets minus the components listed in the Act, with a monthly rate of 0.0366%, it is possible to analyze the consequences of introducing a banking tax for both the banking sector and the state budget, which is the objective of this article. The paper aims at assessing its impact and proposing solutions eliminating negative consequences.

Financialisation concerns dynamic and increasingly complex processes occurring in the socio-economic sphere. These processes result from changes that are taking place in the private sector and, at the same time, from the activity of the state related to its company – ownership functions, as well as to the key legislative or regulatory functions that organise market operations.
The article aims to offer a preliminary systematisation of the main currents of discussions about financialisation and the state, including aspects of monetary, fiscal, and social policy, as well as welfare issues. The complexity of the financialisation processes makes it difficult to discuss the relationship between the state and financialisation in causal terms. They are implicit in the mechanisms of the modern capitalist market economy and in the paradigm of constant growth of prosperity, associated mostly with its financial dimension.
The presented considerations are an introduction to in-depth research, which should include both the evolution and changes of modern capitalism in the structures and institutions of the state, and, above all, the increasing complexity of financialisation that takes place in the context of internationalization, and democratization of finance. Some aspects of financialisation, like attempts to use cryptocurrencies in order to undermine the state’s sovereign power and the central bank’s monopoly on money issuance, make it difficult to formulate reliable future projections. However, projections of the relationship of financialisation and the state as a participant and regulator of the socio-economic system should not be based on the assumption of exogeneity of financialisation in relation to the state. In fact, the state is a key actor of the processes of financialisation. Moreover, due to its rights and obligations, it uses financialisation to achieve economic and social goals.

The aim of this article is to assess the influence of the source of majority capital in banks quoted on the Warsaw Stock Exchange on the way corporate governance influenced these entities in the years 2014-2018. Annual reports and reports on supervisory board’s activities of analyzed banks were the main sources of this research. The study showed that corporate governance mechanisms in banks with dominant domestic capital differed from mechanisms in banks with foreign capital. The differences related to the dispersion of the share capital, the number of members in supervisory boards and management boards, including foreigners, and the frequency of changes in these bodies’ composition. The number of meetings of the supervisory board and of its resolutions varied as well. Moreover, in banks in which the majority shareholder changed from foreign to domestic, characteristic features of banks with domestic capital were revealed. This concerned, among others, higher dispersion of share capital, lower share of foreigners in banks’ authorities, frequent changes in the supervisory board’s composition and its more intensive work in terms of meetings and resolutions. In regard to other characteristics, the impact of changes in the ownership structure was ambiguous.

Credit risk is an inherent part of the functioning of banks and is multi-conditional. Credit risk factors in commercial banks and cooperative banks are in principle similar, though their significance is not identical. One of the most important differences is the ability to mobilize equity (equity or share capital), as well as nonidentical strength of the influence of shareholder owners on planned results of operations. The situation regarding organizational restructuring in both sectors or the way of strengthening the market position is also different. All this results in endogenous factors having greater impact on credit risk in the cooperative sector. However, the influence of exogenous factors has a significant impact on credit risk of both commercial and cooperative banks, although cooperative banks are less sensitive to the business cycle. Still, the concept of collective responsibility of the group under cooperative protection systems (IPS – institutional protection scheme) requires a restrictive approach to violating both regulatory and market discipline in order to nip in the bud the temptation to abuse one of the group’s members at the expense of others. The conducted model empirical analyses should be continued using time series of panel data and updating the assumptions, which would make it possible to authenticate the differences found between cooperative and commercial banks.