The European Union and the euro: how to deal with a currency built on dreams?

The least that can be said is that since 2007 the European Union and the currency of most of its members, the euro, are not doing well. The old continent seems to have lost its competitiveness against the United States and the emerging countries. The euro crisis has turned into a succession of country crises coming up and receding like flood and ebb and threatening to intoxicate the entire Eurosystem. In this book we deal with this period of turmoil, putting it into a larger historical, institutional and economic context and sketching the efforts of the EU and its member states to escape economic and financial breakdown. The book covers the fundamental elements of the economic and monetary union (emu) that the EU has been building for more than half a century, going from a customs union, over the single market to the euro. It not only deals with the institutional architecture of the emu but also pinpoints at the weaknesses that endangered it and describes the conversion of this system into a truly EU system of economic governance. The many facets of this emerging system are sketched. The reasons why a fiscal union is needed are explained as well as how this fiscal union looks after the sixpack, the twopack, the fiscal compact and the European semester. The same is done for banking union with a European supervision of financial institutions and a Europe wide resolution deposit guarantee scheme. Also the new face of monetary policy with unconventional tools such as outright monetary transactions and long term funding of financial institutions is analyzed. This book is an indispensable guide to understand what is happening with the European union and the euro in these turbulent times