ECB

This paper is an attempt to conduct an analysis of the origins and the primary outcomes of ‘Quantitative Easing’ that European Central Bank has been implementing since March 2015.
The aim of the paper is to show the effectiveness of Quantitative Easing and the responsiveness of the Eurozone to obtain the expected results. Although the general idea is that QE effectively sustained economic recovery from the 2012 Global Financial Crisis, some critiques have been enhanced by academics: all these important evaluations would be taken into account in the completion of this work.
The analysis will be conducted through the usage of updated statistics regarding the main macroeconomic indicators which might assess either the results either the prospects or the consequences which Eurozone would face after QE’s ending in the short-run.

Il contributo affronta il tema della definizione trattamento di vigilanza da parte della BCE per le operazioni di trasferimento del rischio delle NPEs, diverse dalle c.dd. “cartolarizzazioni prudenziali”, poste in essere dalle banche. L’analisi condotta, dopo aver esaminato le interferenze con le disposizioni contabili e le specificità comunque rinvenibili sul fronte prudenziale, evidenzia come dal complesso regolamentare disciplinante la materia non sia ravvisabile alcun divieto in ordine alla menzionata tipologia di operazioni e conclude ipotizzando alcuni accorgimenti percorribili dagli intermediari al fine di ottenere l’approvazione dell’autorità di vigilanza.

Il ruolo delle banche centrali corrispondenti a due delle aree economiche più importanti del pianeta è diventato sempre maggiore negli ultimi anni soprattutto dopo il 2007, anno in cui, convenzionalmente, viene fatta cominciare la crisi.
Si è deciso di affrontare questo argomento sia per la sua attualità sia per cercare di comprendere il modo attraverso il quale le banche centrali operano.
Nel capitolo 2 si procederà ad un’analisi della Banca Centrale Europea partendo innanzitutto dal processo di formazione del mercato interno cominciato nel 1957 con il Trattato di Roma che istituì la CEE (Comunità Economica Europea) fino ad arrivare al  Trattato di Maastricht del 1992 che sancì la nascita della BCE avvenuta poi ufficialmente nel 1998.
Verrà analizzata la struttura dell’Istituto con sede a Francoforte ed infine si focalizzerà l’attenzione circa obiettivi e compiti che gli Stati membri, attualmente 17, hanno ad essa affidato.
Nel capitolo 3, in maniera speculare verrà poi trattata la Banca Centrale Americana, la quale ha una storia ben più longeva.
Il primo tentativo di creazione di una banca centrale americana risale infatti al 1791 anche se l’effettiva nascita della Federal Reserve, così come la conosciamo oggi, è datata 1913 con la firma, da parte dell’allora Presidente degli Stati Uniti Woodrow Wilson, dell’Employment Act.
Anche qui si procederà ad una disamina degli organi che compongono questa istituzione.
Infine nel paragrafo 3.3 saranno trattati gli obiettivi ed i compiti della FED.
Nel capitolo 4 invece si cercherà di mettere a confronto i due Istituti attraverso la comparazione delle politiche monetarie da loro adottate, come ad esempio il quantitative easing per la FED e l’operazione LTRO per la BCE. Il confronto verterà su alcuni temi attualmente molto dibattuti quali indipendenza, trasparenza e accountability.
In seguito sarà trattato il loro diverso approccio di politica monetaria: bank oriented per quel che riguarda la BCE e market oriented per quanto concerne la FED.
Saranno poi confrontati gli obiettivi dei istituti e il loro margine di manovra in un periodo di shock finanziari come quello attuale e verrà condotta un analisi sul presunto rischio di moral hazard nel quale incorrerebbe la FED ogni qualvolta è stato effettuato un salvataggio, si prenderà in esame, al riguardo, l’analisi dell’economista William Poole.
Verrà svolta infine un’analisi sul concetto di credibilità delle banche centrali.
Nel capitolo relativo alle conclusioni si analizzerà il lavoro svolto evidenziando i motivi che hanno portato ad alcuni miglioramenti significativi negli Stati Uniti per quel che concerne l’economia reale, cercando di capire le difficoltà che incontra l’Europa nel superare la situazione di crisi.

The paper offers a reflection on how the ECB approaches its mandate and tests how well its key crisis-response policies and initiatives rest within a framework of law. It is argued that there are limits to doing 'whatever it takes', even when things are considered economically necessary. The Union is based on a foundation of law and excessive discretion, warranted though it may be, can undermine the whole basis of the European project. The paper offers a discussion drawing examples from the ECB's interventions in markets and its decisions in relation to Greece, as a response to the European debt crisis. The paper then moves on to examine the nature of the ECB's independence within the institutional structures of the EU and to define how the concept of the rule of law is understood within the European institutional setting. The investigation ends by exploring the tensions between European law, institutional decision making and national constitutional law, by looking at the backlash against the expansion of ECB competences in Germany. The paper ultimately argues that doing the right thing is not necessarily compatible with doing the legal thing. The ECB may not have been currently found to violate its mandate, but the link between economic criteria, such as conditionality, and legality (as determined by recent German challenges to Mario Draghi's choices) is an unsteady platform from which to defend the rule of law in Europe.

ABSTRACT

Throughout modern economic history it became evident that transparently and efficiently working financial sector is inevitable prerequisite for smooth functioning of modern economy. During 1990s many transition countries have experienced severe financial crises and also developed countries have witnessed periods of financial fragility and currency turmoil. High costs of financial crises as well as their increased frequency made national authorities worldwide turn their attention to question of financial stability. Moreover, in the last decade volume of financial transactions, considerably increased and financial markets deepened, which has made question of financial soundness even more important.
The European crisis is the superlative case study for scrutinizing both the weaknesses of Europe’s framework for new economic governance and the actual method of European integration. This crisis is an ongoing financial crisis that has made it difficult or impossible for some countries inside Eurozone to refinance their government debt without the assistance of the third parties. The reasons for the Eurozone crisis are many and varied, with some general causes and some country-specific factors. The European debt crisis which began at the end of 2007 and appeared clearly as a major threat in 2010, is actually a product of combining factors that yielded in the undergoing grim situation which is full of uncertainty about when will the crisis come to an end. The European answer to the sovereign debt crisis is the banking union. In the banking union, and especially in the SSM, the European Central Bank and the European Banking Authority will undergo significant changes.
Even though, the process of European integration is too complex to be comprehended from one single theoretical viewpoint, the crisis has raised old questions about European integration concerning the centrality of the state or not, and concerning interstate interactions. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate whether and to what extent the new framework for economic governance in Europe is mainly a result of interstate bargaining and consequently whether national preferences continue to play an important role in its transformation.
Τo find out which are the dominant political pressures in the move towards a banking union, the theories of neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism provide for contradictory expectations on the dynamics of integration. While neo-governmentalism assumes that integration towards a banking union is merely triggered by spillover effects and the pressure that is exercised by institutions, liberal intergovernmentalism claims that national interests are dominant in the bargaining process. Central banks and international institutions have developed many models and adopted various approaches towards financial markets monitoring. In modern literature, assessment of financial sector`s stability is usually known as Macro-prudential analysis. Overall, the most significant limitations for the ECB’s policy framework, as well as for its flexibility and pro-activity in exceptional situations come through the disintegrated euro area. This makes the ECB’s responsibilities much less straight forward than those of a central bank acting within a single nation state.
This thesis contributes to the literature first through an empirical analysis of the first decade of single European monetary policy within a real-time approach. Building on a new data set, it investigates the predictability of the main policy rate. Second, the thesis sheds new light on the nonlinearity of the policy rule of the European Central Bank (ECB) based on a regime switching framework. Finally, following a more general approach, it provides new specifications of the policy reaction function of Central Banks based on a novel econometric modeling technique.

Subject area
New Economic Governance within the European Banking Union
Key – Words
New Economic Governance, European Integration, ECB, ESCB, Banking Union

Dirk Ehnts beschäftigt sich in diesem Artikel mit der „Modern Monetary Theory“ (MMT) als einer in den USA und Kanada gegenwärtig sehr einflussreichen ökonomischen Strömung. In Deutschland fand diese bisher wenig Anerkennung. Insofern bietet dieser Beitrag Informationen und Einschätzungen, die sonst kaum zu bekommen sind. Bemerkenswert ist, dass der Autor bei seiner theoretischen Positionierung auf die Geldtheorie von Georg Friedrich Knapp aus dem Jahre 1905 rekurriert und das zirkulierende Geld als „Staatsgeld“ ansieht. Auch ist es vor dem Hintergrund der viel diskutierten Geldpolitik der Europäischen Zentralbank reizvoll zu erfahren, wie geldpolitische Prozesse und Innovationen im Lichte der MMT interpretiert werden.

This document explores the already existent politico-psychoanalytic metaphor of the 'Fantastic Family'. It applies it to a specific case study: the recent Greek crisis. Overall, it demonstrates how this nation has evolved from 'Mother' to 'Child' of the 'European Family'. The main theme of this paper is to demonstrate a critique of the EU's handling of the Greek crisis.

The first joint assistances from the IMF and the EU occurred in 2008 and 2009 in Hungary, Latvia and Romania, in a first-time cooperation that was generally positive and productive. But the intervention in the Eurozone has been more complicated and peculiar, due to both the size of lending and the common currency issue. The solution has been the creation of the so-called Troika, formed by the EC, the ECB and the IMF.
This research aims to analyse the set-up of this framework and how the three institutions have been acting within it. It will focus particularly on interventions in Greece and Ireland. Greece was in a deep sovereign debt crisis and required a double intervention, involving the IMF into its biggest lending ever. On the other hand, Ireland was characterised by a severe banking crisis, with the Irish government ending in fiscal troubles after committing large parts of the budget to the bailout of private banks. The two different countries' cases will offer the possibility to better understand the reasons for establishing the Troika, what have been the major successes and failures achieved and how the three institutions have evolved their roles since the start of the crisis.

1. Introduction 2. ECB’s tasks and competences; 3. The intervention of the ECB in the Eurocrisis; 4. Legitimacy of the interventions and conditions attached to it; 5. The unclear borders of monetary policy; 6. Is  the activity of central banking “political”?

Following the financial crisis some key economists questioned the orthodoxy of central banking and monetary policies and argued that price stability is necessary but not sufficient for functioning economies (Blanchard, Dell’Ariccia, and Mauro 2010; Eichengreen and et al. 2011). They called for expanding the responsibility of central banks to the broadly defined goal of financial stability. Whereas the discussion about the lessons from the crisis for monetary policies has been very developed, there has not been much discussion about the lessons from the crisis for the political economy of central banks. From the perspective of the orthodox theory of central banking, a central bank with extensive responsibilities is more discretionary and less independent. In this paper I address the following question: if central banks are endowed with more responsibilities, what are the implications of this shift on the their independence? The paper examines the ‘non standard measures’ of the ECB in the period from 2008 to 2012 and it argues that despite the fact that the ECB stretched its mandate and pursued additional objectives to price stability, it was not less independent. The paper concludes that the orthodox definition of central bank independence should be reconsidered.

L’objectif principal de cette thèse est de développer une analyse des trois banques centrales et de leur cadre institutionnel destinée à l’exercice du pouvoir monétaire. L’étude vise à examiner les mécanismes de « hard law » (établis par les traités, les constitutions ou les lois) de l’accountability politique et sociale des trois banques centrales : la Banque centrale brésilienne (Bacen), la Banque centrale européenne (BCE) et la Réserve fédérale des États Unis (Fed). La thèse a également pour but d’explorer les mécanismes de « soft law » créés par les banques centrales elles-mêmes, mécanismes qui peuvent jouer, pour certaines de ces institutions, un rôle important sur leur légitimité et leur accountability. Cette étude propose une approche juridique spécifique: le droit en tant qu’instrument pour la construction du cadre institutionnel orienté vers l’accountability politique et sociale des banques centrales. Cette thèse affirme que les mécanismes de reddition de comptes et de responsabilisation peuvent soutenir à long terme la légitimité des actions monétaires. Les principales hypothèses de cette étude sont: (i) les mécanismes de « hard law » ne semblent pas refléter l’ensemble des instruments d’accountability politique et sociale des banques centrales étudiées, bien que ces mécanismes constituent le cœur du système d’encadrement juridique destiné à construire et à garantir la reddition de compte et la responsabilisation des autorités monétaires; (ii) les instruments de « soft law » provoquent davantage, et plus rapidement, des changements institutionnels dans l’accountability et la légitimité des banques centrales, notamment en dehors de crise – et, dans ce domaine, il semble avoir une convergence internationale ; (iii) le contexte institutionnel dans lequel opèrent les banques centrales est une variable pertinente pour la conception de l’encadrement juridique des mécanismes d’accountability, spécialement en temps de crise ; et enfin, (iv) en s’appuyant sur les hypothèses de (i) à (iii), la conception et le rôle du droit et de l’analyse juridique dans ce domaine peuvent être repensés et reconstruits – cette étude en présente quelques propositions.

The first joint assistances from the IMF and the EU occurred in 2008 and 2009 in Hungary, Latvia and Romania, in a first-time cooperation that was generally positive and productive. But the intervention in the Eurozone has been more complicated and peculiar, due to both the size of lending and the common currency issue. The solution has been the creation of the so-called Troika, formed by the EC, the ECB and the IMF. This research aims to analyse in particular the role played by the IMF, working for the first time so closely with a regional organization and for the first time as a junior partner. It will focus particularly on interventions in Greece and Ireland. Greece is in a deep sovereign debt crisis and has required a double intervention, involving the IMF into its biggest lending ever. On the other hand, Ireland has been characterised by a severe banking crisis, with the Irish government ending in fiscal troubles after committing large parts of the budget to the bailout of private banks. The two different countries' cases will offer the possibility to better understand the reasons and the pressures behind IMF involvement, what has been atypical in IMF intervention and how its cooperation with the European partners has changed its role and power.

It is a convention to say that the Eurozone architecture is ill-constructed and deficient. However, monetary architecture is not a well-defined term in monetary theory, and there is no consensus what the Eurozone architecture is beyond being a metaphor. By combining insights from the research strand of (critical) macro-finance, this GEGI Study develops a comprehensive definition of monetary architecture in general and presents an inductive, institutionalist model of the Eurozone architecture in particular.

The model portrays two monetary jurisdictions—the US and the Eurozone—which have a hierarchical relationship. Each monetary jurisdiction is subdivided into four segments of central banks, commercial banks, non-bank financial institutions and a ‘fiscal ecosystem’. Different institutions are located within these segments, represented as balance sheets. These have a hierarchical relationship with each other as well, and interlock through the instruments they hold as assets and liabilities. This adds up to a fully self-referential credit system. Each institution has its own respective elasticity space for balance sheet expansion that depends on available counterparties, stipulations for allowed on-balance-sheet activities and available contingent assets and liabilities which are provided by higher-ranking institutions and only become real once a crisis hits. A monetary architecture is thus defined a historically specific setup of segments, institutions, instruments and elasticity space within a monetary jurisdiction.

The model emphasizes the centrality of the TARGET2 system, shows how offshore US-Dollars are enmeshed in the Eurozone, and rejects the notion that a monetary architecture could ever be ‘finished’. It will serve as an starting point for future descriptive and policy-oriented research.

The main focus of this paper is presentation of non-standard monetary policy measures of selected central banks. The banks which are subject of analysis are Federal Reserve  Bank,  European  Central  Bank,  Bank  of  England  and  Bank  of  Japan. All  the aforementioned  central  banks  have  begun  to  apply non-standard monetary  policy measures since the global financial and economic crisis, which has led that inflation rate in  a  long-term  be  below  the  target  level.In case  of  the Federal  Reserve  Bank non-standard policy  actions  were  implementing  to  put  downward  pressure  on  real longer‐term interest rates and more generally to improve overall financial and economic conditions. The European  Central  Bank goal  in  using non-standard monetary  policy  is to return inflation rate to levels below, but close to, 2% over the medium term, while in case of the Bank of England it was response to the North Atlantic banking crisis and to a sharp  downturn  in  domestic  economic  prospects.  The Bank  of  Japan aim  is  to  fight against deflation and to reach inflation target of 2%.

Have European policy makers reacted to the 2008 crisis with single-minded determination to constitutionalize austerity or have they instead been reflexive and used the crisis to generate EU-level buffer mechanisms against financial and macroeconomic crises? This paper argues that this emphasis on austerity from the existing literature on the European governance of the crisis can benefit from two consequential nuances. First, the EU established a full-fledged lender of last resort function for sovereigns and banks (European Stability Mechanism) that might soon morph into a consummate lender of last resort. Second, the EU also acquired a Keynesian face in the form of a countercyclical and competitiveness-boosting lending fund (European Fund for Strategic Investments) that strengthens the EU's investment state regime linking the EU with national development banks. However, the paper finds that the first function comes at the cost of imposing pressures for pro-cyclical fiscal policies on countries facing sovereign debt issues that are in excess of those demanded by the IMF. Similarly, the countercyclical lending fund has had a patchy record at delivering investment support to the countries that needed it the most.

Based on the conceptual framework of the ‘Money View’, this paper argues that European monetary integration until the Eurocrisis has only focused on harmonizing public money on a supranational level while neglecting private credit money creation. The privately issued credit money supply in the European Monetary Union (EMU) is made up of both bank deposits and ‘shadow money’ forms (e.g. money market fund shares and repurchase agreements). The paper discusses if the institutional evolution and the political reform projects after the crisis lead to an upload of the frameworks for private credit money creation on a European level. On the one hand, the paper takes into account the ECB’s role in compensating the unwillingness of European banks to continue intra-EMU cross-border lending by tolerating and supporting TARGET 2 balances. On the other the hand, it addresses the Banking Union reforms. The paper finds that with regard to bank deposits as ‘traditional’ private credit money, a spill-over is taking place that by and large leads to monetary integration further down the monetary hierarchy and seems to establish the public-private partnership for deposit creation on a European level. Finally, the paper defines an avenue for further research on the creation and regulation of shadow money in the EMU.

Il contributo si incentra sulla riforma del sistema dei controlli pubblici sul settore bancario. La crisi economico-finanziaria scoppiata nel 2007 ha impresso una forte accelerazione al processo di integrazione fra gli Stati appartenenti all’Eurozona in una rafforzata ottica federalista, di cui l’adozione della moneta unica e il conferimento alla Banca Centrale Europea delle funzioni di politica monetaria hanno rappresentato una prima embrionale manifestazione. Il processo avviatosi nel 2010, e che affonda le proprie radici nel Rapporto de Larosière, si incardina sull’edificazione dell’Unione Bancaria Europea, un’architettura fondata su tre pilastri tra loro logicamente e temporalmente connessi: il Meccanismo Unico di Vigilanza (MVU), il Meccanismo Unico di Risoluzione (MRU) ed il Sistema Europeo di Assicurazione dei Depositi (EDIS). Si è così assistito ad un percorso di revisione istituzionale e – potremmo dire – di comunitarizzazione del settore creditizio, volto all’accentramento a Francoforte, in capo alla BCE, della vigilanza bancaria.
I regolamenti (UE) n. 1024 del 2013 e n. 806 del 2014 hanno, infatti, avviato un complesso percorso di messa in comune delle competenze di supervisione e risoluzione nel quadro di nuove strutture europee integrate: il Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) e il Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM). Nell’ambito della nuova architettura in fieri della vigilanza bancaria – una “fattispecie a formazione progressiva” – si è venuto, così, a delineare un sistema a due livelli (two tiers system), sviluppato sull’asse verticale della distribuzione di poteri improntati alla co-amministrazione ed all’integrazione procedimentale tra Banca Centrale Europea e Autorità nazionali competenti. Ne è derivata un’ulteriore evoluzione dell’integrazione fra gli stati dell’Eurozona, la quale fornisce il più cospicuo esempio di “federalismo” europeo sinora sviluppato. In un simile quadro di riferimento, si pone l’interrogativo circa il rispetto del principio democratico con riguardo al ruolo materiale assunto dalla BCE, la quale – di diritto e di fatto – ha assunto una posizione non dissimile dalla Federal Reserve degli Stati Uniti d’America. È di tutta evidenza come le innovazioni normative volte all’edificazione dell’Unione bancaria riflettano una scelta ben precisa: quella di affidare l’unificazione economica, monetaria e bancaria ad autorità settoriali ad elevata competenza tecnica, dotate di ampia indipendenza e discrezionalità. Cruciali, dunque, le questioni che l’Unione Bancaria Europea, quale nuovo ordinamento giuridico sezionale, pone in termini di accountability e legittimazione democratica. È noto come il principio democratico sia entrato a far parte – anche dal punto di vista formale – dell’architettura dell’Unione, costituendo, a partire dall’entrata in vigore del Trattato di Lisbona, uno dei pilastri portanti del diritto UE. Pertanto, ciò che bisognerebbe indagare è se – a livello sovranazionale – regole, procedimenti e principi di accountability siano sufficienti a condurre il sistema bancario europeo e l’istituzione che ne è l’indubbio vertice – la BCE – in uno schema logico e coerente con il plesso di norme UE poste a tutela del principio democratico. A fronte dello status costituzionale di indipendenza assunto dalla Banca Centrale Europea, non può non richiedersi, infatti, un aumento della sua accountability, ovverosia della rendicontazione del suo operato agli organi elettivi al fine di non determinare una spaccatura del circuito democratico-rappresentativo.

Eight years after the outbreak of the crisis, the Eurozone (EZ) fiscal policy remains fragmented at national level. This paper’s proposal fills the structural gap between the monetary and the fiscal dimensions of the EZ economic policy suggesting a ‘conventional’ direction to the unconventional Quantitative Easing (QE) policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). We propose an evolution for the QE to tackle the shortcomings of the current ‘decentralized’ fiscal policy in the EZ. In a nutshell, we suggest a change in the composition of QE asset purchases, focusing on buying European Investment Bank (EIB) bonds that, in turn, would be used to finance real investments through the Juncker Plan programme. The rationale of the proposal is legitimised by an overview of the gloomy macroeconomic conditions of the EZ, and the situation in ongoing policies. The mechanism is described in detail, with a discussion of both its strengths and possible limitations.

SOMMARIO: 1. La condizionalità implicita della BCE. – 2. La condizionalità applicata nell’individuazione dei titoli accettati come collaterale per le operazioni di rifinanziamento dell’Eurosistema. – 3. La condizionalità applicata all’erogazione di liquidità di emergenza (ELA). – 4. La condizionalità collegata al programma SMP: le lettere del 2011 a Italia e Spagna. – 5. Il trasferimento dei cd. “SMP profits” alla Grecia da parte della BCE. – 6. Dalla condizionalità ‘implicita’ alla condizionalità ‘esplicita’: il programma OMT e la sua legittimità

L'opera analizza l'evoluzione della nuova governance economica europea ed internazionale che si è sviluppata a partire dalla crisi finanziaria mondiale del 2007. In special modo con la creazione del MES , l'Europa ha dato vita ad una doppia governance, una interna al diritto primario europeo ed una al di fuori di tali regole, che lascia intravedere la possibilità che l' UE stessa possa subire un pesante declassamento nel regolare e rappresentare i rapporti tra gli Stati membri, anche in caso di deflagrazione della zona euro. Invero, il conflitto giuridico-politico scatenatosi con i ricorsi rinviati dalla Corte Costituzionale tedesca alla Corte di Giustizia Europea, in merito all'utilizzo di strumenti non convenzionali da parte della BCE , riafferma, nei termini che vengono esposti, il primato del ruolo delle istituzioni europee. L'emergenza «Coronavirus» rafforza il dibattito-scontro sul ruolo della BCE , e quindi sul futuro dell' UE e dell'Eurozona .

While it is early to mourn the euro, it would be unwise to ignore the magnitude and significance of the changes now taking place in the Eurozone. No doubt, the economic and financial problems in the Eurozone are serious and plentiful. The area is in the midst of multiple, frequently overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises. First, a fiscal crisis is centred
in Greece but visible across the southern Eurozone and Ireland. Governments in Greece and Italy have been replaced in the space of a week because they were unable to guarantee the
rapid implementation of economic reforms. Second, a competitiveness crisis is manifest in large and persistent pre-crisis current-account deficits in the Eurozone periphery and even larger intra-Eurozone current-account imbalances. Italy has accepted IMF and EU monitoring of reforms including deep liberalisation measures that had so far seemed out of reach, notably on labour legislation. Third, a banking crisis was first evident in Ireland but is now spreading throughout the Eurozone via accelerating concerns over sovereign solvencies. Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece are undertaking fiscal and structural adjustment measures – in Ireland, these are already paying off in terms of economic performance and credibility. However, one of the fascinating aspects of the European debt crisis has been the resilience of the euro, suggesting
these fears are overblown. The euro is still a reserve currency, oblivious to the chaos ravaging European economies. As the Euro zone debt crisis enters a new uncertain year, the
question about whether the euro can survive rises. This paper argues that the European crisis is political, and even largely presentational. The paper shows that the Euro can survive as the policymakers in the Eurozone still have various tools to use. These tools include creating exit rules, implementing new stabilisation rules and instruments, adopting new fiscal policy, introducing conditional Eurobonds, using inflation differentials and providing more independence to the European Central Bank.

Arguments for and against Central Bank Independence, assessed in the context of the European Central Bank. Emphasis on implications for democracy. The article was written before the ECB started operating, but some of its arguments may have more relevance today than when it was written.

https://www.lantidiplomatico.it/dettnews-intervista_a_vladimiro_giacch_richiedere_il_mes_gualtieri_cos_perde_tempo_e_rischia_di_peggiorare_la_crisi/33683_33684/

Intervista a Vladimiro Giacché: "Richiedere il MES? Gualtieri così perde tempo e rischia di peggiorare la crisi"

All'emergenza sanitaria seguirà il difficile, difficilissimo momento della ricostruzione economica. Come AntiDiplomatico vi proporremo un percorso di interviste per iniziare a delineare la situazione attuale, immaginare i prossimi scenari e sensibilizzare il più possibile sui fallimenti del passato da non ripetere più in futuro. Iniziamo questo percorso con Vladimiro Giacché*, economista, filosofo e, negli ultimi anni, uno degli osservatori più acuti della situazione macro-economica europea. Intervista esclusiva per l'AntiDiplomatico

Resumen: a pesar de que el Gobierno de España anunció el pasado 9 de junio su intención de recebar ayuda financiera de la Unión Europea (un " rescate " encubierto), puede afirmarse que España se encuentra inmersa en un proceso de rescate desde la crisis griega de 2010. La crisis de Bankia ha precipitado la solicitud formal del rescate y, según, nuestras previsiones, sólo será el anticipo de otro rescate de mayor cuantía y condicionalidad más dolorosa, ya que la ayuda a la banca puede impedir el cumplimiento del déficit pactado con la Comisión Europea. .

Per la BCE i rincari sono «effetti temporanei» o comunque non preoccupanti. La realtà è parecchio diversa. La paventata ripresa dell'inflazione in Italia è legata in particolare ai fortissimi rialzi delle materie prime energetiche, con rincari a doppia cifra delle bollette di gas e luce, e si è estesa inevitabilmente anche ai prezzi del carrello della spesa: negli ultimi mesi, il tasso annuo di inflazione è balzato verso il 7% negli Stati Uniti d'America, sui massimi dal 1982, e al 5% nell'area euro, sui massimi dal 2008. Che cosa sta accadendo? Tra le cause remote dei rialzi dei prezzi si possono sicuramente indicare le politiche monetarie ultra-espansive adottate dalle Banche centrali. Dalla «Grande crisi finanziaria» del 2007-2009 le autorità monetarie mondiali hanno inondato i mercati di enormi flussi di liquidità creata ex nihilo - in ulteriore fortissima accelerazione dopo la crisi del CoViD-19 -, mantenendo compressi i tassi nominali di rendimento dei titoli governativi e perseguendo con accanimento il rialzo dell'inflazione, in modo da "svalutare" nel tempo, in termini reali, i debiti pubblici e privati fuori controllo. Tra le cause prossime del rincaro vi sono le politiche fiscali espansive attuate dai governi per fronteggiare la crisi economica indotta dai lockdown generalizzati, che hanno provocato la frammentazione delle filiere produttive e distributive, con sensibili restrizioni e strozzature dal lato dell'offerta, anche sulle forniture energetiche, con ovvie conseguenze sui prezzi. Il Green New Deal, poi, chiude il cerchio.

«Il proliferare di compiti, funzioni, poteri affidati alla BCE suscita questioni che non possono essere più sbrigativamente liquidate, a differenza di quanto avvenuto in passato, come infondate o legate a schemi istituzionali desueti». Non si tratta più di ampliare poteri convenzionalmente attribuiti dal Trattato, quanto di creare nuove modalità di controllo sulle Banche centrali e, in fondo, sulle politiche di bilancio degli Stati nazionali. A parte i rilevanti profili attinenti alla democraticità di un organo tecnico che vincola assemblee parlamentari nazionali, anche solo dal punto di vista dei rapporti giuridici tra BCE ed organi amministrativi nazionali, le questioni appaiono complesse e non risolvibili con i tradizionali criteri giuridici. Cosicché «la funzione di controllo svolta dalla BCE risulta ambigua da declinare, sotto il profilo giuridico, per l’interessare soggetti giuridici che si dovrebbero trovare in una posizione di reciproca indipendenza nell’esercizio delle rispettive funzioni».
Si tratta di un trasferimento di funzioni ad un organo tecnico senza una reale opzione federale degli Stati che compongono l’Unione. È prova che si tratti di una via sdrucciolevole la preoccupazione espressa dalle Corti costituzionali nazionali e dalla dottrina costituzionalistica.

La produzione scientifica dominante è concorde nel sostenere che il merito creditizio degli
Stati sia esclusivamente verificabile dal rapporto Debito/PIL. Sostenere semplicemente
che un maggior indebitamento sia deleterio può essere vero ma non sufficiente, questo
perché, genericamente, tutti siamo consapevoli che questo sistema prevede
l'indebitamento per la crescita del PIL. Gli Stati, tutti, hanno necessità di investire gli
impieghi acquisiti dalle fonti per realizzare i propri piani di spesa; tradotto, tutti gli Stati,
nessuno escluso, hanno necessità di fare debito, tramite l'emissione di TDS, per ottenere i
mezzi finanziari da impiegare affinché si dia seguito alle politiche fiscali intraprese. Dire
semplicemente che solo un maggior debito pubblico sia causa, e non anche concausa, del
rallentamento crea gli spread in quanto induce tutti a rivolgere l'attenzione sul debito e non
sulla potenziale profittabilità ottenuta grazie a quell'indebitamento. Ma qual è il limite
massimo dell'indebitamento?

This article discusses central bank forward guidance as a performative (Austin) and conative (Jakobson) practice – hence, as a form of audience-centred communication that intends to transform their behaviour when deployed by a narrator who is simultaneously also a character in the story. Taking the European Central Bank (ECB) as its primary example, the article conveys how the double role of narrator and character assumed by this institution renders it more permeable to reactions from the markets and the public. As such, ECB forward guidance is frequently misguided, with its communicative imperatives indeed being ‘corrected’ and ‘reoriented’ by market actors and publics wishing to perceive the European Central Bank as behaving like an impartial and just frontline hero. While acknowledging the presence of conversational features within these reflexive communication practices, the article approaches forward guidance as an unfolding story, not only due to the relevance of the characterisation processes through which the European Central Bank is repositioned as hero or villain by its publics, but also because exemplary episodes exhibit a reminiscent quality that isolates them from their original context and opens them up to the possibility of re-activation – as indeed happened during the recent Covid-19 pandemic crisis.

L’argomento di questa relazione

La relazione è focalizzata sui due principali modelli di associazione
delle banche di credito cooperativo nell’eurozona, ossia gli Institutional
Protection Schemes e i Gruppi Bancari Cooperativi, e sulle implicazioni della scelta dell’uno o dell’altro dal punto di vista della tutela della specificità del credito cooperativo.

The experience of the recent two decades of financial crises shows that donor countries and international financial institutions (IFIs) can respond to a crisis in a peripheral open economy by either of two crisis management strategies: either they can impose harsh conditionality to fix the domestic economy and prevent future moral hazard problems, or they can provide last-resort credit to restore market confidence. In some cases, the crisis management strategy changes as the crisis evolves. What are the factors that determine the choice of key donor countries and IFIs? This article traces the processes by which the USA and the International Monetary Fund designed the crisis management strategy in respect to the Asian crisis, and how Germany and the European Central Bank designed the response to the eurozone crisis, in order to understand how ideas regarding the causes and solutions of a financial crisis interact with the interests of key donor countries. The article argues that in both cases ideas and interests are mutually constituted, but in each case the mechanism that linked ideas and interests was different: whereas in the Asian case US interests led to policy innovation and experimentation and to a change in the crisis management strategy, in the European case ideas played a greater role in shaping German interests. The article explains this difference on the basis of the lessons learned by IFIs from the Asian crisis, which were then implemented in the eurozone case.

Mit seinem Urteil in der Rechtssache Weiss vom 11. 12. 2018 antwortet der EuGH zum zweiten Mal auf Vorlagefragen des BVerfG. In der Sache betrifft das Judikat – wie auch beim ersten Vorabscheidungsverfahren zu Outright Monetary Transactions – die Krisenpolitik der Europäischen Zentralbank. Den Erwartungen entsprechend knüpft der Luxemburger Gerichtshof an sein Gauweiler-Urteil vom 16. 6. 2015 an und bestätigt die Unionsrechtskonformität des Public Sector Purchase Programme. Eine Überraschung stellt hingegen die Verweigerung einer Antwort auf die fünfte Frage zu den Grenzen der Risikoteilung im ESZB dar, deren Folgen nur schwer abzuschätzen sind.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the specific questions that prudential regulation and supervision raise in relation to qualifying holdings, held or acquired by private equity funds in the capital of banks and financial entities subject to prudential supervision. The analysis serves as an observation point for various intersections between regulation of capital and securities markets, on the one hand, and regulation of banks and banking activities, on the other. After having considered the different approaches that EU rules on collective investment undertakings and EU banking law take, the paper shows that the compartmentalisation of financial markets regulation in the EU, still structured in "silos" that tend to be independent of each other, is likely to create frictions that are not easy to solve but which, at the same time, may provide stimulus for more general reflections.