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...

In the revised monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB), "price stability is best maintained by aiming for two per cent inflation over the medium term", with "symmetric commitment" to this target. "Symmetry means that the Governing Council considers negative and positive...