At the 25 th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty, this paper reviews the merits of introducing a safe sovereign asset for the eurozone. The triple euro area crisis showed the costly consequences of ignoring the 'safety trilemma'. Keeping a national safe sovereign asset (the German bund) as the cornerstone of the financial system is incompatible with having free capital mobility and maintaining economic and financial stability in a monetary union. The euro area needs a single safe sovereign asset. However, eurobonds are only foreseen after full fiscal integration. To address the safety trilemma member countries must therefore act as the joint sovereign behind the euro and choose from two options. First, they could establish a credible multipolar system of safe national sovereign assets.For this purpose, they could all issue both senior and junior tranches of each national government bond in a proportion such that the expected safety of the senior tranche is the same across countries while the junior tranche would absorb any sovereign default risk. Additional issuance of national GDP-linked bonds could insure governments against a deep recession that might lead to a selffulfilling default and thereby help to make the junior tranche less risky. The second option is that the member countries together produce a common safe sovereign asset for a truly integrated and stable monetary union by creating synthetic eurobonds comprising both a safe senior claim and a risky junior claim on a diversified portfolio of national government bonds. This appears a more effective solution to the safety trilemma -especially when euro area governments would also issue national GDP-linked bonds -but it requires flanking measures to control for moral hazard.
The sharp rise in public debt-to-GDP ratios in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 posed serious challenges for fiscal policy in the euro area countries and culminated for some member states in a sovereign debt crisis. This note examines the public policy responses to the euro area crisis through the lens of financial repression with a particular focus on how they contributed to easing government budget constraints. Financial repression is defined in this context as the government's strategy -supported by monetary and financial policies -to gain privileged access to capital markets at preferential credit conditions and divert resources to the state with the aim to secure and, if necessary, enforce public debt sustainability.Following a narrative approach, this note finds that public debt management and resolution, European financial legislation, EMU crisis support and ECB monetary policy have significantly contributed to relieving sovereign liquidity and solvency stress and generated fiscal space through non-standard means. The respective authorities have in fact applied the tools of financial repression to restore stability after the euro area crisis.
Since the global financial crisis of 2008 European authorities have set out to strengthen financial governance in order to create a more stable and resilient financial system. As discussed in this paper, the new and updated EU legislation addressed at a wide array of financial markets and institutions also significantly broadened the scope of the existing preferential regulatory treatment of sovereign bonds and introduced new funding privileges for governments. The many regulatory incentives for investors to buy and hold (domestic) government debt facilitate public debt management, at the cost of crowding out private sector funding and raising financial stability concerns every time the government faces distress. Moreover, a privileged access to capital markets reduces market discipline and may lead to moral hazard on the part of sovereigns. The growing scope of these government funding privileges in EU financial law may be interpreted in three (complementary) ways: as a revival of financial repression in a modern prudential guise to reduce the burden of high public debt, as a return to the traditional close relationship between the government and the financial sector so as to align mutual interests in fiscal and financial stability, or as a way to increase explicit and implicit taxes on finance and recoup public revenues lost during the financial crisis. The preferential treatment of sovereign exposures and governments' market access is found in a growing body of EU financial law. Regulatory efforts to reduce it would have to be coordinated at the international level, take account of the financial structure and allow for a (long) period of transition to avoid market disruption.
Starting in June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped up its monetary accommodation in order to counter a too prolonged period of low inflation in the euro area. This article offers a narrative of the monetary policy measures taken up to December 2016 and a review of the effects of ultra-low interest rates. The exceptional monetary stimulus transmitted to the economy broadly as intended. Moreover, it enhanced the financial capacity of economic agents to bear risks. At the same time, the ECB and the European micro-and macro-prudential authorities remained watchful of the unintended side-effects of an extended period of very low or negative interest rates for financial intermediation, financial stability and market discipline and took preventive or corrective measures as appropriate. A joint plan of action carried out by the 19 member countries with the aim to speed up balance sheet repair, accelerate the economic recovery and achieve higher productivity growth could have contributed to a more effective euro area macroeconomic and financial policy mix.
Structural reforms and the European macroeconomic policy regime ■ Monetary policy and structural reforms in the euro area-Ad Van Riet ■ Potential output: A questionable concept-Gustav Horn ■ The Stability and Growth Pact: Stability without growth?-Cathérine Mahieu and Henri Sterdyniak ■ The euro area drifting apart-Jörg Bibow ■ Labour market re-regulation in the UK-Richard Exell Order form / 3 Ad van Riet 1 1 Head of the EU Countries Division, Directorate General Economics, European Central Bank. The original presentation at the ETUC conference on 21-22 March 2006 was prepared with valuable input from Nadine Leiner-Killinger and Roger Stiegert. Comments on this written contribution from Hans-Joachim Klöckers, Klaus Masuch, Victor López and Giovanni Vitale are greatly appreciated. The views expressed in this contribution do not necessarily reflect those of the EC 2 See ECB (2004a) for a general overview of the characteristics of the monetary policy of the ECB.
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