Rocard, M., (2014), “Taming Europe’s Banks”, Project Syndicate, 25 February. Last month, the European Commission unveiled its much-anticipated blueprint for banking reform, aimed at reining in risk-taking by the European Union’s largest banks. But the proposal has met significant resistance, with some warning that it would erode European banks’ competitiveness, and others arguing that it is inadequate to mitigate banking risks effectively. How this debate unfolds will have profound implications …Read More

Onado, M., (2014), “European banks: Between a rock (need of more capital) and a hard place (low profitability)”, VoxEU, 23 February. The financial crisis has put to the forefront the long-debated issue of banks’ capital adequacy, showing that banks were much more fragile than they (and their regulators) pretended, also because they were allowed to push their leverage to levels much higher than any industrial company, or even a hedge …Read More

O‘Neill, J. and Terzi, Al., (2014), “Changing trade patterns, unchanging European and global governance”, Bruegel, 25 February. The world economy is going through its biggest transformation in a relatively short space time. There have been many explanations for this phenomenon but the unprecedented scale and pace of this change and, most crucially, its implications, still seems little understood. In turn, there has been little preparation for, or adjustment to, this …Read More

Bibow, J., (2014), “On German Public Opinion And Illusional ECB Power”, Social Europe Journal, 24 February. After taking a short breather in late January-early February, the markets now seem to be back in ‘happy mode’. Whether the news on the economic recovery is good or bad doesn’t really matter. The current convention is that growth acceleration is under way. That emerging markets had become key drivers of global growth was …Read More

Greene, M., (2014), “The Eurozone’s Imperfect Banking Union”, Open Markets, 20 February. The ECB is currently gearing up to look under the hood of Eurozone’s 128 largest banks in an asset quality review and stress test before taking over supervision of the biggest banks. There is immense political pressure on the ECB from national supervisors to not find any big capital holes in the banks. If big capital holes were …Read More

Ballabriga, F., (2014), “Euro Zone Crisis: Diagnosis and Likely Solutions”, ESADEgeo POSITION PAPER 35, February. This policy brief provides a short guiding tour to the euro zone crisis. It looks at the current  situation, the context conditioning the solutions to the situation, how we got here, and the possible way out. The latter section outlines a set of minimum steps required to make the euro sustainable. Southern euro countries are …Read More

Patel, Α., (2014), “Eurozone Crisis: Another Chapter in the Never-Ending Saga of Boom and Bust”, LSE Eurocrisis in the Press, 21 February. The policy response to the euro crisis since 2008 has been an extremely protracted affair, set against the backdrop not only of containing financial and sovereign debt crises and managing the risks of financial contagion (more normally associated with emerging economies) but also of the possibility of the …Read More

Levy, M., (2014), “Clarifying the debate about deflation concerns”,VoxEU, 21 February. A popular view among economic commentators is that rich countries face a serious risk of deflation, and should adopt aggressive macroeconomic stimulus policies to ward it off. This column argues that despite similar headline inflation rates, the US, Europe, and Japan in fact face very different macroeconomic conditions. In the US, much of the recent disinflation is attributable to …Read More

Braconier, Η. and Pisu, M., (2014), “Roads to deeper European integration”, VoxEu, 20 February. Over the past 60 years, increasing European integration has brought peace and security, besides contributing to large social welfare gains (through lower prices and a larger variety of products). Still, national borders matter a lot within Europe and a vast literature has documented the large negative effect of national borders on trade – also known as …Read More

Barbulescu, R., (2014), “EU freedom of movement is coming under increasing pressure in the UK and other European states”, LSE Blogs, 20 February. EU citizens have the right to live and work in any other EU state. As Roxana Barbulescu writes, however, this principle of freedom of movement has come under pressure from a number of recent developments. Focusing on the UK, she notes that while there are substantial economic …Read More