According to the latest Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises3 See the ECB’s euro area bank lending survey, January 2018, and the ECB’s Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises in the euro area, April to September 2017. , covering the period from April to September 2017, euro area SMEs have continued to see improvements in the availability of bank loans.
Many respectable economists and policy-makers claimed that current account imbalances were the expected result of deeper integration among countries with different levels of economic development. In a monetary union, a current account deficit reflecting the financial balance of the private sector would be no cause for concern.