According to the Elysée, Macron will wait until the end of the month to make his detailed proposal public — just a few weeks before the next European Council meeting in mid-October. A preliminary discussion of deeper eurozone integration will take place at the informal meeting of EU finance ministers in Tallinn, Estonia, on Friday and Saturday. [...]
The old German position is that fiscal restraint and structural reforms in the eurozone countries would suffice to avoid a repeat crisis. But most economists, including German ones, note that external shocks to the European economy would hit different member countries in different ways and that some form of pooling of resources and fiscal transfers — that is, the strong helping the weak — would be necessary in times of crisis to avoid another financial panic. [...]
Contrast this with Merkel’s guarded endorsement of the idea at her summer press conference in Berlin a day before Macron’s interview was published. The common budget, she said, could be made up of “small contributions, not hundreds of billions of euros” from eurozone members and be devoted to rewarding countries that implement structural reforms. As for the eurozone finance minister, the person would merely help provide greater “coherence” in the economic policies of different countries.
That’s also the vision outlined by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday — although he wants the joint economy and finance minister for the EU as a whole. [...]
Skeptics of Macron’s grandiose plans agree that more needs to be done to make the eurozone safer and more stable. But they say it would be enough to complete the major reforms that have already been launched — such as the EU’s banking union, arguably the most important reform of European institutions of the last 10 years.
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