At the 25th anniversary of the Maastricht Treaty, this paper reviews the merits of introducing a safe sovereign asset for the eurozone. The triple euro area crisis showed the costly consequences of ignoring the "safety trilemma". Keeping a national safe sovereign asset (the German bund) as the...

Did global imbalances cause the financial crisis? A number of influential figures have argued that inflows of foreign capital into the US due to the current account deficit helped to trigger the crisis. This paper argues that the evidence for this position is weak. The capital inflows into the...

A popular narrative amongst European policymakers is that Eurozone members facing problems in the bond market are paying the price for past budgetary excess. Fiscal consolidation in these countries is seen as the principal remedy for the crisis. It is clear however that Ireland's problems derive...