You’d think that the banking union would be the easiest of these reforms. What we need most of all here is to introduce a common European deposit insurance scheme, so that the savings of bank customers are protected at the European level if a bank fails. That would further strengthen confidence in the euro, because our money essentially consists of bank deposits.
Right now, Germany is balking at the idea of this kind of mutualisation – not least because many Italian banks are still harbouring masses of bad loans on their balance sheets. Nobody in this country wants to be liable for that. How can this problem be 2/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  solved? It’s already being solved.