Some Member States also proved to be poorly committed to implementing domestic structural and fiscal reforms that would have created more policy space to address shocks. Collectively, the expected dynamics between peer pressure and market discipline did not work, as markets did not believe in the no-bail-out principle, and as national authorities did not really accept peer pressure, nor the implementation of the rules. The absence of coordination has a genuine economic cost. Several studies have estimated it for the EA. It includes a) the cost of crises and assistance programmes, as well as b) the impact on growth due to uneven compliance with budgetary rules before the crisis and rigidity of the rules during the crisis. Let me mention a few numbers. Banking and fiscal crises can be extremely costly: relative to the U.S. growth trajectory, the EA has fallen behind  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  by 5 percent of GDP per capita since 2011. Both the European Commission 6 and the NIESR 7 have shown the large impact of simultaneous fiscal consolidation in Europe, with around 2% larger GDP declines due to intra-EA spillovers. Optimal policy coordination in the EA would have required differentiated consolidation efforts in line with available fiscal space, leading to better growth outcomes. A last illustration relates to asymmetric adjustment driven by current account imbalances at the country level at the beginning of the crisis and contributing to the large external surplus at the euro area level today.
But it is really for the governments to see whether these assumptions remain likely. Any debt restructuring is always very costly in terms of confidence. It is really something that you want to only use as a last resort instrument and do so in the friendliest possible way with lenders. We could wonder whether  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  the repayment schedule is appropriate, but this is really a matter for negotiations between the lenders and the borrowers. Given that debt levels are above 170 per cent GDP, isn’t debt restructuring inevitable? C.N. It very much depends on the assumptions on Greek growth in the future, which in turn will be dependent on the pace of Greek reforms and the growth in the euro area as a whole. Is it even possible for the ECB to decide on further monetary policy easing with a possible bond purchase programme just a few days before the Greek election? C.N. Nothing has been decided yet at the ECB but we will have to take these uncertainties into account. But the Greek bond market is extremely small and so the question maybe difficult in theory but in practice it doesn’t really apply. Just to make it clear, the negotiations with Greece won’t block the ECB, will they? C.N. No, they won’t. The problem of Greece is rather minor compared to the question of whether or not and when to step in with action on further market segments in our unconventional monetary policy.