In 2012, to stave off the collapse of their currency union, Europe’s leaders sought to end the so-called “doom loop” between the solvency of their governments and their banking systems. Two years later, a banking union was born.

Created as a crisis response, like the postwar coal and steel community, this ten-year-old union is another step in Europe’s long integrationist road. Yet – as Nicolas Véron points out in Europe’s Banking Union At Ten: Unfinished Yet Transformative (Bruegel, 2024) - the effort to "break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns remains fragile and incomplete".

Together with Jean Pisani-Ferry, Nicolas Véron is a co-founder of the Bruegel public-policy think tank in Brussels and a scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in Washington. A specialist in financial systems and regulatory reform, he is an alumnus of the École Polytechnique and the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and - until 2000 - was a French civil servant. He has written and co-written many papers on banking supervision, crisis management, and Eurozone policy governance.

*The author's book recommendations were Central Banking Before 1800: A Rehabilitation by Ulrich Bindseil (OUP, 2020) and 7500 Euros: Pastiches politico-littéraires by David Spector (Wombat, 2022).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack.

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