To sum up, here is a snapshot of risk-sharing mechanisms in EMU on the eve of the global economic crisis: financial markets which had developed surprisingly quickly – perhaps too quickly, in the light of the large transnational capital flows within EMU; insufficient surveillance by governments of current account imbalances and insufficient risk management by market participants; and, at the same time, little policy effort to achieve flexibility, convergence or fiscal responsibility owing to a benign global environment, and perhaps to the erroneous belief that Monetary Union would in itself engineer convergence.
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