The outgoing German chancellor is overrated at home and abroad
Many Germans sympathized with (even if they didn’t quite follow) Sinn’s argument that the way the ECB supported the peripheral economies through its TARGET2 settlement system amounted to a covert “transfer union.” What the Southern Europeans needed to do was what Germany had done after 2003: to reduce their price and wage levels, and thereby regain domestic competitiveness. This was a constant refrain in the German press.
Like many others, I said at the time that such arguments made little sense.
Even in the midst of the pandemic, it took the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to force through the long-overdue fiscal integration that had always been implicit in the project of a single European currency.
Niall Ferguson Bloomberg 29 augusti 2021
Germany, it says, will never accept a “transfer union”. Target 2
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2019/09/germany-it-says-will-never-accept.html
Target2 credits have reached €920bn - and Italy
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2019/06/target2-credits-have-reached-920bn-and.html
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