While the nature of shocks and propagation mechanisms still largely remain on the battlefield of economic theory, empirically observed patterns and the consequences of the materialisation of risks necessitate our reaction, which should be based on our best knowledge and abilities. Allow me to get into more detail here. Optimal policy responses in a multi-country setting require a careful examination of real and financial cycles, both domestic and international. For that purpose, let us look at five important patterns that seem to characterise them. First, financial cycles seem to have a lower frequency and higher amplitudes compared to standard business (real) cycles. Credit and asset price cycles may take long to develop their potential to destabilize the financial system. Further on, such a potential may emerge regardless of watchful micro-prudential supervision or stable inflation. The resulting notion of systemic risk may be identified as the interplay of macroeconomic shocks that make financial sector vulnerable, the contagion resulting from financial interconnectedness and endogenous financial imbalances associated with credit booms, credit leverage and risk taking behaviour of financial institutions 3. Second, there are still no mechanisms in place to engineer sustainable synchronisation of cyclical movements across Europe. The question of cyclical synchronisation arises as particularly important within the international setting. This is the factor that makes policy responses even more complex, especially within a currency union such as the euro area, where the damage of suboptimal policy responses might exceed mere fiscal costs and output losses – they may threaten the future of the euro itself.

With single monetary policy, commitment not to bail-out heavily indebted member states is necessary to eliminate potential for moral hazard. However, the actual euro-area experience demonstrates strong incentives for sovereign fiscal policies to “trespass” on the prudent fiscal stance, either in the expectations of non-enforcement of the no bail-out clause, with the implicit assumption that sovereign default will be politically unacceptable, or through a direct support of common monetary authority through special monetary operations. This uneasy triangle is usually referred to as the fiscal trilemma of the monetary union. Such a “holy trinity” makes impossible the cohabitation of the independent monetary policy of a supranational central bank, national fiscal sovereignty and the no bailout clause 15. In order to ease the frictions stemming from national fiscal policies, the monetary framework of the euro area was reconstructed by implementing the elements of the banking union (the Single Supervisory Mechanism and the Single Resolution Mechanism), setting up the European Stability Mechanism (ESM, previously the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF)) as well as by starting the ECB’s quantitative easing program (QE). All these mechanisms should help to decouple bank distress and sovereign debt pressures. 16 The described trilemmas in the European economic and monetary framework, with the still absent synchronisation of real and financial cycles, have given birth to a specific quadrilemma that demonstrates difficulties faced by policy makers in the euro area.