Eurozone Crisis: Another chapter in the never-ending Saga of Boom and Bust

The policy response to the euro crisis since 2008 has been an extremely protracted affair, set against the backdrop not only of containing financial and sovereign debt crises and managing the risks of financial contagion (more normally associated with emerging economies) but also of the possibility of the euro’s extinction – at least until the European Central Bank made assurances in July 2012 that it would do “whatever it took” to save the euro, a declaration that reverberated around global financial markets and acted as a necessary precondition to the effectiveness of a long-term policy response (the jury is still out on the latter, of course).