The lesson of the sovereign debt crises of the 2010s, and of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is that EMU irreversibility, if not to remain a wishful statement in the founding treaties, necessitates to be completed by carefully designed ramparts for extraordinary times beside regulations...

The EMU has been founded on the exclusive national responsibility doctrine, except for monetary sovereignty devoted to a single bank. This foundation had and still has complex political motivations, but it is in overt contradiction with the fundamental fact that creating a highly integrated...

There is now wide agreement that under the pressure of the 2008 crisis serious flaws have emerged in the design of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as a supranational architecture with the overarching end to generate and distribute collective benefits from integration and...

Macroeconomic imbalances (MI) play a prominent role in the "consensus narrative" of the crisis of the Euro Zone (EZ). Accordingly, the package of governance reforms undertaken by the EZ countries amid the crisis includes the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP) to be enacted by the...

The crucial role of current account imbalances (CAI) is widely acknowledged in the consensus narratives of the European crisis that followed the Great Recession. On the basis of this interpretation, new EU initiatives arose, in particular the so-called "Six Pack" in 2011 and the establishment of...

Is a fiscal stimulus of investment a viable complement to, or substitute for, monetary policy? We address this issue by means of real option valuation of a private investment which generates private as well as public benefits. A surge in uncertainty about private profitability delays investment...

We examine the so-called "Neo-Fisherian" claim that, at the zero lower bound (ZLB) of the monetary policy interest rate, and the economy in a depression equilibrium, in order to restore the desired inflation rate the policy rate should be raised consistently with the Fisher equation. This claim...