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\"When the first rumblings of the coming financial crisis were heard in August 2007, three men who were never elected to public office suddenly became the most powerful men in the world. They were the leaders of the world's three most important central banks: Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. Over the next five years, they and their fellow central bankers deployed trillions of dollars, pounds and euros to try and contain the waves of panic that threatened to bring down the global financial system. Neil Irwin's The Alchemists is both a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we've ever seen, and an insightful examination of the role and power of the central bank. It begins in Stockholm, Sweden, in the seventeenth century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world. It is the story of how these figures and institutions became what they are - the possessors of extraordinary power over our collective fate. What they chose to do with those powers is the heart of the story Irwin tells. Irwin covered the financial crisis for the Washington Post, enjoying privileged access to leading central bankers and the people close to them. His account, based on reporting that took place in 27 cities in 11 countries, is the holistic, truly global story of the central bankers' role in the world economy we have been missing. It is a landmark reckoning with central bankers and their power, with the great financial crisis of our time, and with the history of the relationship between capitalism and the state. Definitive, revelatory, and riveting, The Alchemists shows us where money comes from--and where it may well be going.\"--Publisher's description.

A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS), based on extensive archive research. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. The second stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving EEC legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement. The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet Mourlon-Druol's account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, Mourlon-Druol concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.

Monetary Theory provides an alternative to monetary economics based on the distinctive properties of money banking. The book: Analyses money Shows that the distinction between money and income is rooted in the banking practice Examines exchange rate instability and financial crisis Puts forward an alternative proposal for European Monetary Union.

This is an indispensable guide to the processes that led to the creation of the European single market and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. The new edition has been expanded to assess the economic, monetary, political, and institutional significance of the euro. It also reconsiders the rationale and underlying philosophy of EMU in the light of.

Following De Grauwe (2016), this research advances the idea according to which economies that are part of a monetary union issue debt in a medium of exchange they cannot control: financial markets develop the capacity to impose default on such economies. We are interested in how previous research analyzed the notion that, when economies are autonomous and they employ the exchange rate as a vehicle to handle asymmetric shocks, they confront comparable constraints on the performance of exchange rate strategies. When a monetary union is affected by significant asymmetric shocks, the member economies have to deal with tough adjustment issues. Empirical and secondary data are used to back the assertion that, in a monetary union, economies that are affected by long-lasting asymmetric demand shocks demand wage elasticity and labor flexibility to rectify for them, and if the latter generate substantial budget deficits, financial markets tend to intensify the consequences of the asymmetric shocks, boosting the demand for severe regulation of wages and labor flexibility. Our article makes conceptual and methodological contributions to the view that member economies of a monetary union are exposed to varying market reactions, generating more volatility in the business cycle: an economy undergoing a recession and a rise in the budget deficit might be affected by wide-ranging transactions of its government bonds, causing a liquidity crisis and superior interest rates, and possibly coercing the government of that economy to adopt budgetary austerity measures, thus intensifying the recession.

The idea that European monetary integration is inherently neoliberal in its very structure gained prominence after the Eurozone crisis and has had considerable impact. The implication is that the only alternative to disciplinary neoliberalism in Europe is an exodus from EU institutions. This article contributes to the testing of such arguments through an empirical analysis of the origins of the Eurozone in the formation of the EMS during the 1977–1978 Locomotive Conflict. It finds that the variety of construal in EMS design and contingencies in the politics of selection between such designs do not accord with structuralist arguments.

Why was recovery from the euro area crisis delayed for a decade? The explanation lies in the absence of credible and timely policies to backstop financial intermediaries and sovereign debt markets. In this paper we add light and color to this analysis, contrasting recent experience with the 1992–3 crisis in the European Monetary System, when national central banks and treasuries more successfully provided this backstop. In the more recent episode, the incomplete development of the euro area constrained the ability of the ECB and other European institutions to do likewise.

Questo articolo analizza il percorso di convergenza dell’Italia verso la banda stretta del Sistema Monetario Europeo (SME), la crisi valutaria del 1992 con la conseguente uscita della lira dallo SME, e gli effetti della crisi. Oltre a offrire una sommaria ricostruzione delle vicende che portarono all’uscita di lira e sterlina dallo SME, questo saggio insiste sulla dimensione europea, e non esclusivamente italiana, della crisi, mostrando il prevalere di inerzie istituzionali e interessi nazionali a livello continentale. L’Italia si rivelò un attore particolarmente fragile in un contesto di sistematica debolezza. Il saggio, inoltre, richiama l’attenzione sull’importanza che gli interessi statunitensi ebbero per la crisi del 1992 e la sua risoluzione. Infine, ricordiamo come la crisi costrinse l’Italia a perseguire una politica virtuosa per aderire al progetto dell’euro e si rivelò, in altre parole, un blessing in disguise.

Il processo di integrazione monetaria in ambito comunitario venne avviato alla fine degli anni Sessanta quando si evidenziò l’esigenza di avere una moneta comune nel MEC. Prevista per l’inizio degli anni Ottanta la moneta unica, l’euro, arrivò solo alla fine del Novecento, sia a causa delle conseguenze dello shock petrolifero, sia per la grande difficoltà di armonizzare economie molto diverse tra di loro in un contesto caratterizzato, dopo la caduta dell’URSS, dalla diminuzione della solidarietà intra-comunitaria. La nascita della UEM garantiva ai cittadini e alle imprese dei paesi aderenti una maggiore forza e stabilità della nuova moneta, nonché l’eliminazione dei costi di conversione delle valute e di quelli legati alla fluttuazione dei tassi di cambio. I limitati poteri attribuiti alla BCE e il ricorso a parametri concepiti in un mondo economico molto diverso da quello del nuovo millennio rendeva però l’eurozona molto meno stabile di quanto previsto dai suoi fautori.