Reliance on rules would be less of a problem if ‘market discipline’ could be trusted to keep the finances of the Member States on the narrow path of sustainability. By market discipline we mean the constraints that market perceptions of a country’s creditworthiness puts on its borrowing.
But if the maxim is “too big to fail”, then the state and the taxpayers are vulnerable to blackmail. 1  Compare Kern, Steffen: Global financial centres after the crisis, DB Research, August 2010. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  The financial crisis has exacerbated the problem in so far as some of the surviving banks have become even bigger or more interconnected.