Portfolio Approach and/or Firm Approach? Remarks on Futures of Strategic Bank Management

Continuing technological progress will both foster international economic integration and remove some of the traditional obstacles (such as time and distance) to global bank. A predictable prediction about bank management is that the focus has been shifting to noncooperative game theoretic models of strategic behavior. Currently, most theories of bank management are based on the Markowita-Tobin portfolio-theoretic approach, which omits several crucial aspects of bank behavior. This paper presents an alterative: a framework of strategic bank management that integrates the risk considerations of the portfolio-theoretic approach with the market conditions of the firm-theoretic approach. Our framework provides a conceptual approach for analyzing bank behavior in the liberalization environment.