INSTITUTIONAL ANSWERS TO THE 2008 CRISIS IN THE US AND THE EU: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

The crisis of 2008 highlighted the existence of a regulation deficit in the field of the supervision of financial markets and institutes both in the US and the EU, or rather the nearly non-existent supervision in the case of the EU. Some economists even argue that the crisis of 2008 was caused only by the lack
of sufficient supervision; a legacy of the deregulation process, which took place during the Reagan era. Although it cannot be stated that the majority of the
economist completely share this point of view — moreover the relevant literature is rather heterogeneous regarding the causes of the crisis —, the author in his earlier studies accepted that the lack of proper supervision was of paramount importance and argued so. Another issue, which gives rise to debates, is the role of 2008 crisis in eliciting the crisis of the Economic and Monetary Union (hereafter: EMU), namely that the crisis of 2008 was the basic cause or only the catalyst? In this regard the literature seems to be more homogenous and the majority of the authors accept that the innate structural weaknesses of the EMU — namely its asymmetrical structure, the lack of proper control mechanism and the lack of political union — foreshadowed the crisis. Thus the crisis of 2008 could only be the catalyst of the crisis of the EMU.