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...

Within the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of Europe the responsibility for the single monetary policy lies with the European Central Bank (ECB). By contrast, economic policies remained national and must therefore be coordinated to ensure the proper functioning of EMU. A central government...