New Books In Economics

Today I talked to Pedro Gustavo Teixeira about his new book The Legal History of the European Banking Union: How European Law Led to the Supranational Integration of the Single Financial Market (Hart, 2020) Since 1950, the political and economic integration of Europe has tended to accelerate through functional mini-unions: coal and steel, nuclear power, and – in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic - it could well be healthcare next. The most recent of these mini-federations is the European Banking Union; born out of necessity at the height of the sovereign-debt crisis in 2012-13 but, as this new history emphasises, built on foundations laid in the 1970s. Within three years of its political green light, the EBU's core agencies - the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) under the authority of the European Central Bank and the Single Resolution Mechanism - were in place yet, while huge changes have taken place, critical business has been left unfinished. "A regime geared towards ever more integration with distrib