As the regulator becomes ever more prescriptive and fixed with knowledge (or blamed for the lack of it), so the chances of a bail-out increase, market discipline weakens further and regulators get drawn in further. In my opinion, public sector bureaucracies find risk management extremely difficult. Rarely are the payoffs for taking more risk commensurate with the incentives facing individual decision makers.
His idea was that, by taking deliberate policy steps to become interdependent – like sharing raw materials – European countries would become inseparable. And indeed they have. We have become both safer and richer. The formation of the Single Market gives every EU citizen average welfare gains of € each year1. Today, Schuman’s sequence is, in some ways, being reversed.