George Papaconstantinou, (2018), “Learning from mistakes: A ‘what if’ approach to assessing proposals for euro area reform”, VoxEU, 21 June The policy discussion on euro area reform has entered a critical phase, and analytical contributions informing that discussion have become particularly important. Among these, the recent CEPR Policy Insight (Bénassy-Quére et al. 2018) stands out. It is an important contribution to the discussion which the European Commission kicked off institutionally …Read More

Javier Cravino, Ting Lan, Andrei Levchenko, (2018), “Differences in consumption baskets across households and the distributional consequences of monetary policy”, VoxEU, 16 June There is growing recognition that monetary policy shocks have distributional consequences. An active literature argues that monetary policy can have differential effects across various types of agents – savers versus borrowers (Doepke and Schneider 2006), the financially constrained versus the unconstrained (Williamson 2008), or young versus old …Read More

Eric Monnet, (2018), “Macroprudential tools, capital controls, and the trilemma: Insights from the Bretton Woods era”, VoxEU, 13 June Assessing how domestic monetary policy is constrained by international capital flows remains a key but open empirical and theoretical question (Farhi and Werning 2014, Shambaugh and Klein 2015, Rey 2016, Obtsfeld et al. 2017). It is often approached from the angle of the trilemma – the impossible trinity of international finance …Read More

B. Eichengreen, (2018), “The Populists’ Euro”, Project Syndicate, 12 June The majority of Italians want two things: new political leadership and the euro. The question is whether they can have both. The point about new leadership is uncontroversial. The country’s two ruling populist parties, the League and the Five Star Movement (M5S), together commanded 50% of the vote in the March 4 general election, and, as a result, have majorities …Read More

Jochen Andritzky, (2018), “Enhancing the ESM lending toolkit through a precautionary credit line”, Bruegel, 11 June Transforming the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) into a “European Monetary Fund” has come to dominate the debate on euro area reforms, albeit no one has actually proposed it to become “monetary”. Instead, in a recent interview, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel raised the idea of a short-term credit facility for member states hit by external …Read More

Charles Goodhart, Michael Hudson, (2018), “Some ways to introduce a modern debt Jubilee”, 11 June One of today’s great social concerns is the increasing income and wealth inequalities within countries, although rapid growth in China and the rest of Asia has meant that global inequality has fallen (see Milanovic 2016). An influential book by Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler, argues that inequality will rise inevitably unless one, or more, of …Read More

Peter Bofinger, (2018), “Digitalisation of money and the future of monetary policy”, VoxEU, 12 June Most economists will agree that the future of money will be more digital than today. But while everybody speaks of ‘digitalisation’, the concrete meaning of this term remains very often unclear. There are four major areas where digitisation could modify the traditional forms of money and credit and as consequence modify the theory and practice of …Read More

Ben Margulies, (2018), “What Italy’s political crisis told us about populism in Europe”, LSE EUROPP, 11 June Europe’s leaders and thinkers long feared the catastrophe that might ensue if Italy inaugurated a populist government. Then they feared the catastrophe that might ensue if Italy didn’t. To recap: On 4 March, Italy held a general election. Two populist parties, the radical-right populist Lega and the vaguely centrist Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-Stars …Read More