The International Dimension of EMU: The Interplay between the Global Financial Stability Architecture and the European Union

It is a truism that the European Union’s self-proclaimed autonomy may be a helpful concept in legal terms–primary to preserve the monopoly of the European Court of Justice to interpret European Union (EU) law–but it is equally clear that the EU is to a large extent influenced by the decisions and policies of other international institutions. The present chapter aims to assess this external influence in relation to a specific, but core dimension of the EU, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). More specifically, we will assess the influence of what these days is known as the Global Financial Stability Architecture (GFSA), on the EMU. As will be further explained below, the GFSA is a network of the key global financial institutions that collect data, conduct research, provide insight and propose rules of conduct for the financial sector. Its mission is to rethink (global) macroeconomic policy to make economies more resilient–how to steer the economy clear of risks that could lead it to collapse; how to deal with real-time crises; and how to initiate recovery. Its primary method is to find out how differing components of financial markets act and react to one another, and to propose prudential regulation that shapes the behaviour of private financial service providers, of governments and of central banks.