States can raise financing through relationships that depend on market accountability or political accountability, respectively, and one can be substituted with the other. In the EU, market accountability as a dominant mode of raising financing has been steadily supplanted in the EU by political accountability in the relationship between debtor states, on the one hand, and creditor states, the EU and the ECB, on the other, thus engendering democratic tensions in the evolution of EU economic governance. One way of solving the widely maligned ‘democratic deficits’ within the EMU would be to restore the market accountability enshrined in the Treaties, as evident in part on the ban on monetary financing, bailouts and state aid. Moreover, market accountability can be likened to the accountability concept of Dawson and Maricut-Akbib, with openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness and publicness underpinning various procedural and substantive dimensions of market accountability.

Insolvencies are a consequence of capitalist economies and the market factors that underpin and drive them, including competitive behaviours, and the appetite for and bias towards risk, limited social and material resources (among them, credit), and the asymmetrical relationship of expectation to capacity. Insolvency always has some – and may have vast – private, public, institutional and systemic consequences. The distinction between insolvency as it relates to corporations, and bankruptcy in relation to persons, is made in the Australian Constitution. Insolvency and bankruptcy occur when corporations, businesses or persons are unable to pay their debts when and as they fall due. The term 'bankruptcy' is applicable to personal insolvency, while insolvent corporations or businesses go into liquidation. Bankruptcy laws provide the framework within and procedures by which the failure of debtors to pay their debts can be handled in an organised and efficient manner, making similar provisions for corporations, businesses and persons, while at the same time recognising the differences between the subjects of the processes.