• 1 Facultés des Lettres et des Géosciences Université de lausanne

This article addresses the structural power of banks by analyzing the market for Leveraged Buy-Outs (LBOs) in France during the 2000s. It attempts to operationalize the concept of financial hegemony in an original way, working from the idea of point-vulnerability in a graph, introducing a method that can be used to model a network according to this criteria (cohesive blocking). The analysis shows that banks oc-cupy not only the most central, but also the most vulnerable positions in the system compared with corporations and private equity firms. The crisis of 2007-2008 has enabled banks to impose their conditions and to firmly reinstate their hegemony which was somewhat contested during the bubble period. The structure that results from such an evo-lution has ambiguous implications for systemic risk.

• 1 HAL