A European Central Bank Standing Guard in a European Currency Union

A European Central Bank Standing Guard over a European Currency Union, in this year of the euro’s 25th anniversary, is a book revisiting the architecture of the European currency union as it continues to evolve and faces today’s concurrent challenges posed by its members’ high and diverging government debt levels, debt sustainability concerns, and the considerable public expenditures, investments and reforms needed in particular to address climate change and the green transition.

Key components reviewed include the single monetary policy for the eurozone; the common rules and processes for keeping a measure of discipline and orderliness in the members’ economic and budgetary policies; the containment of financial fragmentation within the eurozone; and stability support for members under financial stress.

What’s in this book:

The book focuses especially on the central role of the European Central Bank (ECB) and explores such questions as:

• how the ECB has defined its monetary policy mandate and calibrated its actions within the matrix of broadly worded objectives and constraints set by the EU Treaties;
• the possible tensions and trade-offs between the ECB’s primary mission of inflation control and the episodic need to avert risks to financial stability, contain financial fragmentation and preserve the cohesion of the European currency union
• the difficulties of a single monetary policy interacting with the relative heterogeneity of economic characteristics and national fiscal policies across the eurozone
• the ECB’s possible role in supporting the transition to a lower-carbon economy, and
• how judicial review by the European Court of Justice has to contend with the complexities and inherent uncertainties of monetary analysis and the ECB’s need for a broad margin of policy judgment

How this will help you:

As part of the EU’s incomplete economic and monetary union, the currency union remains a work in progress. The challenges and policy choices at hand present serious legal questions that cannot be viewed in isolation from the economic and political issues—a kind of 3D combination puzzle to be put together. The book takes the readers on a journey into this fascinating subject and seeks to encourage them to take a close interest in it and to ask the critical questions that need to be asked.