A Banking Union Baby Step

Europe’s leaders finally recognized the need to centralize banking supervision, with the ECB taking over responsibility. But, while putting the ECB in charge of banking supervision solves one problem, it creates another: can national authorities still be held responsible for saving banks that they no longer supervise?

BRUSSELS – At the beginning of the financial crisis, it was said that banks were, in Charles Goodhart’s crisp phrase, “international in life, but national in death.” At the time (2008-2009), large international banks had to be rescued by their home countries’ governments when they ran into trouble. But the problem now in Europe is the opposite: banks are “national in life, but European in death.”

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