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The European sovereign debt crisis has brought to the fore a fault line between German and French politicians and board members of the ECB. In this paper we argue that these differences are rooted in cultural differences between Germany and France. This position is based on previous research on the relation between central bank independence and national culture and the construction of cognitive maps of a French (Jean-Claude Trichet) and German (Axel Weber) member of the ECB’s board. Consequently, although a European wide agreement on the ECB’s independence has been reached, national cultural differences still play an important role in the Board members’ preferences and the ECB’s policy. As such, this paper illustrates one of the central tenets of this volume that the Cultural Turn in economics has a distinct value for understanding financial affairs. Moreover, it introduces a new methodological approach to operationalise dimensions of culture in the process.

In debates on the need to “complete” the banking union, there has been little attention to the omission of shadow banks from the supervision mandate given to the European Central Bank with the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM). We argue that there can be no completion of the banking union without dedicated pan-European supervision of all non-banking financial institutions. We identify four explanatory modalities for the omission of shadow banking from the SSM mandate and discuss organizational options for institutionalizing European supervision of its shadow banking sector.

The recent resurgence of inflation in Europe has led the ECB to increase interest rates and phase out asset purchase programs designed to address the effects of the Great Financial Crisis. This article investigates how the ECB adjusts its logic of responsibility throughout this series of crises. Using a topic model and in-depth analysis of speeches, we examine the ECB's strategic framing of causal linkages related to inflation during three historical periods: the Central Bank Independence (CBI) era (1998-2011), the secular stagnation era (2011-2021), and the new inflation era (2021-). Our findings indicate that modifications made to the CBI's causal linkages during the secular stagnation era shaped the ECB's framing of the new inflation era in a novel way. However, despite acknowledging difficult policy tradeoffs, which they tended to obscure in the past, ECB policymakers still seek to uphold the imperative of responsibility by adapting it to varying policy contexts.

During the past decades, central banks acquired considerable independence from democratic institutions under the Central Bank Independence (CBI) template. Yet, the changing role of central banks since the 2007–2008 crisis has led to a (re)politicization of central banking and has weakened the scientific and political consensus on the CBI model. In turn, central bankers have tried to neutralize repoliticization and these efforts have shaped their unconventional monetary policies. In this chapter, we review how the (critical) political economy literature has scrutinized the evolving role of central banks this last decade, and we debunk central banks’ depoliticization strategies. First, we examine how financial power shapes central banks’ unconventional policies to the benefit of private finance. Second, we analyze how these “high-finance” struggles affects “low-finance,” that is, what are the distributive effects of post-crisis monetary policy on firms and households? Finally, we review current debates on alternative monetary tools, which could potentially fare better than current monetary arrangements in distributive, ecological, and democratic terms.

Since April 2014 to March 2015, the European Central Bank expansionary monetary policy instigates a huge depreciation of the euro in terms of dollar. According to the mainstream monetary theory, these dynamics should make the exports cheaper and at the same time make the imports more expensive. Has real depreciation of the euro helped in the improvement of European countries’ trade balances? Following the main methodologies in the recent literature, our study analyses the effects of this depreciation both for Italy and Germany towards the US. We use industry-level data at monthly frequency. The results are different from each bilateral relationship. We find that 11 industries register a long-run improvement (8 for Italy and 3 for Germany). The J-curve effect is proven just in six cases, always for Italy. The inverted J-curve effect is proven in eight cases, four for Germany, and four for Italy. These results seem to be an indirect demonstration of the structural asymmetries between German and Italian economies: German economic system is more able to be competitive with a strong currency, than Italy.