From one crisis to another: the European central bank’s role from the great recession to the Ukraine war

Abstract

The paper examines the changing role of the European Central Bank over the last 15 years and holds that the ECB has gone through a process of learning by doing, relying on earlier crisis experiences in forming its response to successive crises. This learning process has enabled it to sustain the euro countries against various exogenous shocks both within the power of its mandate and beyond it, implementing novel reforms. We argue, in fact, that crises stimulated institutional innovations such as the introduction of Eurozone banking supervision and the European Banking Union. The latter was a particularly ground-breaking idea, not contemplated by the Treaties, and addressed to exceptional endogenous dynamics. During the last two emergencies, triggered by the pandemic and the war, the ECB seems finally to have learned how to manage crises via a synergic use of available tools.