Had the Council had less room for manoeuvre in suspending or halting fiscal surveillance procedures in the years preceding the crisis, some of the euro area countries would not be facing as severe a sovereign debt crisis today.
However, this was not the entire story – surveillance instruments were lacking altogether as regards the build-up of competitiveness losses and of macroeconomic imbalances, which have made any solution to fiscal problems even more challenging. Therefore, the ECB has also called for a fully-fledged surveillance procedure for competitiveness indicators and for macroeconomic imbalances.