What ECB speeches tell us about the battle of ideas during the Eurozone crisis

A battle of ideas dominated the academic debate on the Eurozone crisis. One view stressed the importance of fiscal discipline, while the other highlighted the systemic roots of financial turmoil. Drawing on a new study based on a quantitative text analysis of ECB Executive Board members’ speeches, Federico Maria Ferrara shows how the ECB progressively moved from a fiscal to systemic narrative of the Eurozone crisis. The findings indicate that this shift anticipated and accompanied ECB President Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” pledge in summer 2012, and that the ECB’s ideational turn was incremental and driven by policy learning dynamics.