Apr 12, 2021

The Legal History of the European Banking Union

How European Law Led to the Supranational Integration of the Single Financial Market

Pedro Gustavo Teixeira

Hosted by Tim Jones

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Summary

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 distributive consequences, but without stabilisation capacity in the form of risk-sharing among member states and largely insulated from democratic politics will likely not be sustainable", writes Pedro Gustavo Teixeira.

Pedro Gustavo Teixeira is director-general of governance and operations of the Single Supervisory Mechanism of the European Central Bank, secretary of its Supervisory Board, and a lecturer at the institute for law and finance at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. (Any views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of the ECB).

*The author's own book recommendation is Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower (Penguin, 1999 - latest edition 2018).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.