3 - The Failure and Abrogation of the Maastricht Model

Summary

In order to extract economic criteria for European fiscal federalism, Chapter 3 examines public accounts statistics and the economic literature on EMU from 1992 through the European sovereign debt crisis. It follows a chain of macroeconomic indicators running from nominal interest-rate convergence to the sovereign debt crisis. It examines nominal interest-rate convergence; structural determinants of sovereign bond yields; real interest rates; private-sector domestic credit; cross-border credit flows; consolidated banking claims; current-account imbalances; real effective exchange-rates; public and private-sector debt; the sovereign-bank feedback loop; and fiscal policy. The analysis finds that the Euro Crisis was a private debt crisis, not a public one. The causa sine qua non of the crisis is a severe mispricing of private and public debt caused by a failure of Articles 121-126 TFEU to induce markets to differentiate between sovereign borrowers under a (now realised) bailout expectation – not sovereign debt.