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Abstract
The rules of the European Union, and the Eurozone in particular, have been adopted with three important agreements: the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997 and the Fiscal Compact of 2012. The European model envisages public finances with strictly controlled debts and deficits. The rules have been most
recently refined with the Fiscal Compact, which introduces reference to the ‘structural balance’ with a deficit of no more than 0.5% of GDP. The result is an automatic flexibility of balance, which allows some room for manoeuvre, but insufficient in the case of severe and prolonged crises. This gives rise to the recurring fears of the
unsustainability of the euro and the numerous proposals to introduce new stability and growth mechanisms, such as eurobonds, European unemployment transfers and the simultaneous reduction of fiscal pressure.
The author’s argument is that the scarcest resource in Europe today is reciprocal trust and that the only way compatible with this is a temporary departure from the rules of the Fiscal Compact for investments and reforms: a road already taken, but at levels that are still inadequate