Dr. Steffen Murau| steffenmurau.com

Author: Steffen Murau

State Finance Beyond the Core Budget. Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies in Germany’s Fiscal Ecosystem (with Gregor Laudage, Armin Haas, and Andrei Guter-Sandu)

The state as a financial actor is commonly imagined to be a unitary entity that interacts with the wider financial system via its core budget operated by the treasury that generates inflows via taxes and […]

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‘Re-assessing Fragmentation of the Euro Area Banking System. Offshore Channels for Cross-Border Banking Activities’ (with Torsten Ehlers)

It is an established assessment that since the Eurocrisis, the Euro area banking system has been fragmented. Representing the Eurozone’s monetary architecture as a web of interlocking balance sheets, we carve out four different types […]

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‘Encumbered Security. Conceptualizing Vertical and Horizontal Repos in the Euro Area’ (with Alexandru-Stefan Goghie and Matteo Giordano)

Despite the paramount centrality of repurchase agreements (repos) in today’s market-based finance regime, both conceptual and empirical questions about European repo markets are insufficiently explored as contradictory legal and accounting treatments make their on-balance-sheet representation […]

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‘Transformation of the Eurozone Architecture. On Crises and Institutional Change in the Offshore US-Dollar System’ (with Alexandru-Stefan Goghie, Matteo Giordano and Friederike Reimer)

The Eurocrisis was a make-it-or-break-it moment for the EMU with a profound impact on the transformation of the Eurozone architecture. However, its underlying macro-financial causes remain insufficiently understood. While dominant narratives emphasize excessive sovereign debt […]

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‘Euro Internationalization and the Future of the Offshore US-Dollar System’ (with Jens van ‘t Klooster)

A key objective of President von der Leyen’s “geopolitical” EU Commission is improving the international role of the euro. The Juncker Commission had put this old idea back on the agenda, motivated by crumbling transatlantic […]

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‘Green Macro-Financial Governance in the European Monetary Architecture. Assessing the Capacity to Finance the Net-Zero Transition’ (with Andrei Guter-Sandu and Armin Haas)

The Green Transition to net-zero carbon emissions in Europe requires massive financing efforts, with estimates of 620 billion EUR annually, but the headwinds are substantive. Central banks seem overstretched and busy tightening to combat inflation; treasuries are […]

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‘Macro-Financial Innovation in Times of Crisis: The Role of the Recovery and Resilience Facility in Transforming the Eurozone’s Monetary Architecture’ (with Friederike Reimer, Andrei Guter-Sandu, and Armin Haas)

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), introduced as EU’s main macro-financial response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has been hailed as Europe’s Hamiltonian moment and raised great expectations for future fiscal integration. Despite its promised radicality, […]

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‘The Mefo Operation. A Macro-Financial Analysis of Hjalmar Schacht’s Shadow Money Scheme’ (with Armin Haas, Andrei Guter-Sandu, and Matteo Giordano)

In summer 1931, the collapse of two major banks pushed Germany into the nadir of its great depression. Large-scale credit creation programs were discussed but considered unfeasible due to the constrained macro-financial environment at the […]

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‘Primary Dealers in the Offshore US-Dollar System. Intermediating Treasury and Central Bank Balance Sheets’ (with Will Bateman)

This study analyzes the Primary Dealer model for the issuance and distribution of sovereign debt as a distinctive feature of today’s international monetary system, the Offshore US-Dollar System. Primary dealers are a group of private […]

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2024 | ‘Towards a Public Sustainable Finance Paradigm for the Green Transition’ (with Philipp Golka and Jan-Erik Thie), Finance and Society

Sustainable finance is often discussed as a solution to the climate crisis, but its impacts are limited. We introduce the concept of “public sustainable finance,” in which the state has a central role to play […]

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