Monnet and the social market economy

The foresight of Monnet — one of the architects of the EU — has held up in this crisis as it has in past ones. The pandemic helped the EU cross the Rubicon of common borrowing for fiscal transfers.

For two decades from the 1990s on, Europe’s governing parties — the centre-right but also the centre-left, notably under Gerhard Schröder in Germany — were seduced by a form of market fundamentalism

That governing philosophy was already wearing thin after years of fiscal austerity, under-investment, and the growing threat of climate change. The pandemic put the nail in the coffin: the obvious imperative of smart state intervention, to manage the health crisis and to support livelihoods through lockdowns, allows Europe to embrace the social market economy again.

Martin Sandbu 19 December 2021

https://www.ft.com/content/c6760232-80cc-4a25-a1a1-7315f620b63c

A new Washington consensus

The conversion by the IMF and World Bank to support the activist state would put Saul of Tarsus to shame

Martin Sandbu FT 11 April 2021

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-new-washington-consensus.html

How Jean-Claude Juncker's grand plan for the EU was first laid out 84 years ago

In a book called The United States of Europe. It was written by a close ally of Jean Monnet

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-jean-claude-junckers-grand-plan-for.html

Prodi: It is politically impossible to propose that now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created."

"I am sure the euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments. It is politically impossible to propose that now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created."

Romano Prodi, EU Commission President. 

Financial Times, 4 December 2001

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2011/12/prodi-it-is-politically-impossible-to.html