Since the start of the crisis, the link between banks and their sovereigns has only been strengthening, with dire consequences for the periphery’s economies. To focus on Spain, in October 2008, the Spanish financial system had 78bn of Spanish government bonds. The loop is also strengthening in the other direction. The hidden losses in the banking …
The recovery and reconstruction of the European economy after the COVID-19 pandemic will be a huge, challenging task for the European Union, a task that will require hard decisions and difficult choices. To avoid disappointment and to escape a new lost decade (as happened after the 2008 financial crisis), it will be crucial not to …
The idea that Europe’s response to the economic crisis should be based on the issuance of common perpetual bonds has been slowly gaining ground, but proposals that entail substantial increases to member states’ debt risk hampering growth for decades to come. This column argues that the time has come for genuine European spending financed through …
test Faced with a huge increase in the number of COVID-19 cases, by now all EU governments have undertaken strategies of varying degrees to ‘flatten the curve’ – to reduce the rate of growth of the pandemic in order to avoid a collapse of European healthcare systems. This column, taken from the recent Vox eBook, …
Paper prepared for ECB Conference on “Fiscal Policy and EMU Governance”, Frankfurt, 19 December 2019 Luis GaricanoMember of the European Parliament Professor of Economics and Strategy, IE Business School (on leave) AbstractNearly eight years after its inception, the European Banking Union is crumbling. None of its two stated objectives—breaking future contagion between banks and sovereigns, …
Two proposals to resurrect the Banking Union: the Safe Portfolio Approach and SRB+ Read More »
