Explaining the Eurozone crisis requires explaining the origins of the external imbalances until then. The paper divides the literature arguments into three "fundamental causes", not mutually exclusive: a competitiveness problem, North-South flows, and excess of public and/or private spending....

We assess the impact of the Eurosystem's Targeted Long-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTROs) on the lending policies of euro area banks. We first build a theoretical model in which banks compete in the credit and deposit markets. We distinguish between direct and indirect effects. Direct effects...