Since 2020, Europe's financial sector has been severely stress-tested by a global pandemic and a major land war yet, compared to the period between 2007 and 2012, the impact has been remarkably muted. Still minnows compared to their US peers, Europe's post-crisis recapitalised banks nevertheless have held up well. And so, by and large, has the quality of their assets despite ten years of slow growth and low inflation followed by enormous volatility, high inflation and interest rates heading to two-decade highs.

How much of this has been luck? How much is due to the redesign of European banking supervision after the punishing experience of the 2007-12 crisis? What still has to be done? To answer these questions, Robert Holzmann and Fernando Restoy have pulled together 21 contributors from policy-making and the academy to examine these fundamental questions in Central Banks and Supervisory Architecture in Europe: Lessons from Crises in the 21st Century (Edward Elgar, 2022).

Since 2019, Robert Holzmann has been governor of the Austrian national bank and his country’s representative on the European Central Bank’s governing council. Formerly, an economist at the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank, Holzmann has taught economics full-time in Vienna and Saarland and as a visiting scholar at Harvard and Oxford.

Since 2017, Fernando Restoy has chaired the Financial Stability Institute at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. Trained at the LSE and Harvard, Restoy joined the Bank of Spain in 1991 and rose to the position of deputy governor, chairman of Spain’s FROB crisis resolution authority, and a member of the supervisory board of the ECB's Single Supervisory Mechanism.

*Holzmann's book recommendations are: Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022), Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State also by Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2018), and Der Dreißigjährige Krieg: Europäische Katastrophe, Deutsches Trauma 1618-1648 by Herfried Münkler (Rowohlt Berlin, 2017). Restoy chose A Promised Land by Barack Obama (Viking, 2020) and Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (William Heinemann, 2009).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack.

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