The International Monetary Fund (IMF) prepares annual assessments the Euro area macroeconomic and financial policies since 1999. It provides consistently more critical evaluations than the Commission and ECB. IMF outlined numerous policy recommendations for the regulation and supervision of increasingly integrated EU financial markets and of the emerging cross-border financial groups. These proposals typically reached beyond what the EU authorities deemed satisfactory and politically feasible at the time. This paper traces the diffusion of the IMF proposals through the EU policy documents on regulation of cross-border financial groups since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007. It demonstrates that the IMF criticism of some aspects of the EU regulatory framework were corroborated by the crisis experience, which made the EU - and especially the Commission - more receptive of the IMF ideas. At the same time, the British veto of any shift of regulatory powers to the EU level makes their adoption unlikely, unless there is a major breakthrough in EU economic governance due to Euro crisis.
