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The European Central Bank\u2019s 20th anniversary arrives today as another financial scare \u2013 this time in Mario Draghi\u2019s Italian homeland \u2013 shows that the euro area still hasn\u2019t grown up.
\nIt\u2019s a chance for the ECB president to remind governments that their political project, to create a monetary union out of economically and culturally disparate sovereign nations, is far from finished. As anti-establishment populists gain ground across the bloc, the risk is that the single currency\u2019s weaknesses could allow it to be ripped apart.
\nItaly highlighted that tension this week when a euro-sceptic finance minister nominated by democratically elected politicians was vetoed by the nation\u2019s president, putting the country on course for new polls. Bond yields soared in the country, but also in neighbouring Spain and Greece, awakening memories of 2012 when investors bet the eurozone would splinter.
\n\u201cThe euro keeps catching up with the effects of the last crisis and then another one breaks,\u201d said David Marsh, head of OMFIF, a think-tank for central banking, and author of books on the history of the euro. \u201cEither you move to some kind of political union with genuine pooling of sovereignty – a genuine sharing of risks including necessary debt restructuring, which is pretty large step – or a danger of some catastrophic crisis or a breakup becomes more acute.\u201d
\nSome of those concerns will be addressed by European Union leaders at a summit on June 28-29, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron have pledged to present a joint initiative to boost the union\u2019s resilience.
\nMajor progress might be hard to agree on though, as Merkel faces resistance from among her allies and parts of the opposition. She\u2019s unlikely to loosen her stance given that Italy\u2019s election earned victories for parties promising big spending in the country that already has the euro area\u2019s largest debt burden.
\n\u201cThe main issue is that participation in the euro requires countries to respect certain conditions and rules,\u201d said Francesco Papadia, who was head of the ECB\u2019s market operations from 1998 to 2012 and is now a senior fellow at the Bruegel think-tank in Brussels. \u201cIf these conditions and rules are not respected, the construction is shaken.\u201d
\nThe ECB itself is certainly is stronger than on June 1, 1998, when it was formed out of the European Monetary Institute and set up in a rented tower block in downtown Frankfurt. That was seven months before the euro was introduced.
\n\u201cEuropean Monetary Union was an hubristic endeavour from the start, full of unprecedented ambition in historical terms. The initial minimalist design didn\u2019t do justice to the wide-ranging implications of the project. The framework is not yet complete and is still risking existential threats\u201d ECB vice president Vitor Constancio said on May 17.
\nThe central bank has taken on responsibility for banking supervision, and developed powerful new tools such as quantitative easing, negative interest rates and free bank loans to guide the eurozone through two financial crises and avert the risk of deflation. Eurozone membership has jumped to 19 countries from 11.
\nYet it also became a lightning rod for public discontent. Its new \u20ac1.3bn ($1.5bn) headquarters was a focal point for riots in 2015, and the institution was in the crossfire the same year as Greece was forced to impose capital controls. Core countries Germany, France, the Netherlands and Austria have all seen the rise of political groups opposed to the euro and to deeper integration.
\nSweden\u2019s Riksbank, the world\u2019s oldest central bank, is celebrating its 350th anniversary this year. Speakers at a conference last week to mark the occasion included the heads of the 324-year-old Bank of England, Mark Carney, and the 105-year-old Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.
\nThe ECB is a newborn in comparison, but one tasked with being the custodian for the world\u2019s second-biggest currency.
\n\u201cCan a currency survive without a political union, a monetary union without a political union?\u201d Otmar Issing, the institution\u2019s first chief economist, said at the event. \u201cHow must the monetary union be reformed to make it less fragile in the context of crises? These are the challenges which the ECB will be confronted with for, I am afraid, some time to come.\u201d
\nOutgoing ECB vice president Constancio echoed that sentiment in more granular form in a video posted on Twitter yesterday, the day of his retirement.
\n\u201cThe crisis itself showed that the initial design of the monetary union was insufficient,\u201d he said, highlighting flaws from a lack of common deposit insurance to the need for a region-wide capital market. \u201cMonetary union, being a collective endeavour, needs at the centre a macro stabilisation function \u2013 and that has to be done by introducing a stronger coordination of fiscal policies.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The European Central Bank\u2019s 20th anniversary arrives today as another financial scare \u2013 this time in Mario Draghi\u2019s Italian homeland \u2013 shows that the euro area still hasn\u2019t grown up. It\u2019s a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,57,100,120,132,137,139,166,174,201,202,209,232,233,244,246,249,256,277,279,288],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aramco","tag-baroudi","tag-ecb","tag-euro","tag-francesco-papadia","tag-gas","tag-gazprom","tag-italy","tag-lebanon","tag-offshore","tag-oil","tag-opec","tag-putin","tag-qatar","tag-rosneft","tag-roudi","tag-russia","tag-saudi","tag-total","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}