Economic policy challenges in the new year  In order to be able to say the same thing for the euro area as a whole, we need to make decisive progress in tackling the financial and sovereign debt crisis in 2013. The financial crisis has been upon us for more than five years now, and the sovereign debt crisis for three years.
Many people are weary of the crisis and would rather not hear about it. This crisis fatigue narrows people’s focus so that they are concerned only with smoothing the waters in the short term. But we all know from our own experience that problems have a habit of not going away until the root causes are dealt with.