Dassesse and Isaacs can claim to be prophets before their time. Having written a book on Banking and Competition Law of the EEC in 1978, they produced this present work in 1985, at the beginning of the year which culminated in the negotiation of the Single European Act, intended to achieve the completion of the internal market by the end of 1992. In this context, the provision of financial services and the movement of capital within the EEC have come very much to the fore, and it may be hoped that a further extended volume will appear in due course.

Given the authors’ earlier publication, it is not perhaps surprising that nearly half the main text is devoted to competition law. Whether it was necessary, given the plethora of books on the subject, to attempt a short exposition of the competition rules in general before considering their application to the banking sector may be doubted. There is a particularly detailed analysis of the leading judgment in this area in Züchner v. Bayerische Vereinsbank [1981] E.C.R. 2021, holding in effect that there is nothing intrinsically special about banks in the context of the EEC competition rules. There is a particularly interesting discussion (pp. 37–39) of whether interest rate agreements are a matter of monetary policy or subject to the competition rules, though more traditionally-minded lawyers might be surprised to see the duplicated texts of speeches delivered by members of the EC Commission cited as sources.

The section of the book on establishment and services in the banking sector takes the form essentially of a detailed (and critical) commentary on the 1977 Directive on credit institutions and the 1983 Directive on the supervision of credit institutions on a consolidated basis, pointing out inter alia that the system of authorization under the 1979 Banking Act constituted a response to the requirements of the 1977 Directive. The authors note the reasons why home country control was not acceptable in 1977 (p. 75) but, given the use of that principle in the unit trusts Directive in 1985, it remains to be seen whether its incorporation into the Commission’s 1988 proposal for a second Directive will lead to its adoption.

The third part of the book, on free movement of capital and current payments, is very brief, though it does contain a clear exposition of the judgment of the European Court in Luisi and Carbone v. Ministero del Tesoro [1985] 3 C.M.L.R. 52, making the distinction between those concepts. On the other hand, the consolidated text of the Directives on the movement of capital as at the date of publication is printed in the Appendix. This, of course, is an area of much current activity, with major amendments having been enacted in late 1986 and proposals for further liberalization adopted in 1988.

In conclusion, although it is a slender volume, this is a clearly written account of an area of European Community Law on which there has been a lack of commentary but which is of growing importance. While it may well not have been intended as an academic work, the