Dr. Steffen Murau| steffenmurau.com

European Monetary Union

‘Re-assessing Fragmentation of the Euro Area Banking System. Offshore Channels for Cross-Border Banking Activities’ (with Iñaki Aldasoro and 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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‘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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‘European Monetary Unification through Novation. The Political Economy of the TARGET System’ (with Matteo Giordano)

When Economic and Monetary Union became effective in January 1999, it remained unclear what accounting treatment to choose for claims and obligations that the Eurosystem’s National Central Banks (NCBs) incur against each other in the […]

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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 Ludwig Schulze)

This study adopts a dynamic perspective on the transformation of the Eurozone architecture, using the macro-financial model developed in Murau (2020) as conceptual framework. It analyzes changes in the web of hierarchical interlocking balance sheets […]

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‘The Transformation of Eurozone Fiscal Governance. Mitigating Fiscal Discipline through a Proliferation of Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies’ (with Andrei Guter-Sandu), New Political Economy

The original Maastricht regime designed the Eurozone’s fiscal segment in a way that sought to keep member states’ treasury budgets balanced by disciplining them through market forces, reducing the overall volume of public indebtedness, prohibiting […]

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2020 | ‘A Macro-Financial Model of the Eurozone Architecture Embedded in the Global Offshore US-Dollar System’, GEGI Study July 2020

It is a convention to say that the Eurozone architecture is ill-constructed and deficient. However, monetary architecture is not a well-defined term in monetary theory, and there is no consensus what the Eurozone architecture is beyond being […]

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2022 | ‘Rethinking Monetary Sovereignty. The Global Credit Money System and the State’ (with Jens van ‘t Klooster), Perspectives on Politics

This article proposes a conception of monetary sovereignty that recognizes the reality of today’s global credit money system. Monetary sovereignty is typically used in a ‘Westphalian’ sense that simply denotes the ability of states to […]

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2016 | ‘European Monetary Integration and the Public-Private Money Divide. Can Post-Crisis Reforms Harmonize Private Money Creation in the Eurozone?’

Based on the conceptual framework of the ‘Money View’, this paper argues that European monetary integration until the Eurocrisis only focused on harmonizing public money on a supranational level while neglecting private credit money creation. […]

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2016 | ‘EU, US and ASEAN Actorness in G20 Financial Policy‐Making. Bridging the EU Studies – New Regionalism Divide’ (with Kilian Spandler), Journal of Common Market Studies

This article compares the European Union’s (EU) actorness in foreign financial policy to that of the US and ASEAN. It thus contributes to the dialogue between EU studies and the New Regionalism by putting it […]

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