IMPLICATIONS OF BANKING SUPERVISION ACROSS THE EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION, A SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISIS UPDATE

The current paper analyses the latest measures taken by the main European governing bodies with regard to the banking supervision across the European Monetary Union (EMU) following the ‘sovereign debt crisis’ phenomenon and its continuing effects throughout the Euro zone for the last five years. Officially preaching financial integration in order to ensure stability of the European banking system, most often the European governing bodies amplify the exact phenomena they expect to reduce doing more harm to both creditors and depositors and ultimately leading to a more fragile business banking environment. The importance of banks is acknowledged at European institutional level as main channel through which the monetary policy is triggered across EMU, therefore active measures have been taken in this regard. Questioning the extent to which these measures are legitimate and meet the purposes that they claim, constitutes the aim of the present paper. Another close linked purpose is a better understanding of what stability means, why it is important and what makes stability occur in a banking system. Having understood and set the theoretical grounds, it therefore follows easily to analyse through this glance the latest actions pursued by the European financial governing bodies focusing on the ones addressing supervision of the banking sector within EMU. The paper concludes and provides a set of recommendations by reminding the nature and role of banks for the real economy, the same objective the European financial governing bodies’ target, but which they consistently fail to meet.