The discussions on the first meaningful blueprint for a European monetary union already highlighted challenges that we have not yet fully overcome.
Yet people have become suspicious of the way much of the activity in the financial system amounts to the production of “intermediate” financial services, delivered to others within the same sector: the “slicing and dicing” of risk, re-allocating it around the system to those who are most willing and best able to bear it (or, sometimes perhaps, and much more troublingly, to those who least understand it).