Phoebus L. Athanassiou (LLB, LLM, PhD) is Senior Lead Legal Counsel with the Legal Services of the European Central Bank, a published author of works on banking and financial law, and a member of the Academic Faculty of the Institute of Law and Finance at the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany.

Angelos T. Vouldis (MEng, MSc, PhD) is an Economist at the European Central Bank, with year-long policy experience in financial crises and the stress testing of financial institutions. He has published extensively in leading journals on banking, financial stability, business cycles and institutional change.

Introduction

(1) The Sovereign-Banks Nexus: An Economic Analysis

(2) The European Sovereign Debt Crisis as a Source of Case Studies

(3) An Economic Analysis of Policy Options

(4) Closing the First Channel of Contagion: Hitherto European Actions and Their Critique

(5) Closing the Second Channel of Contagion: Legal Assessment of Policy Options

Concluding Remarks

The European Sovereign Debt Crisis: Breaking the Vicious Circle between Sovereigns and Banks explains why the euro area's progress towards reining in the risks arising from the well-documented bi-directional financial contagion transmission mechanism that links sovereigns to commercial banks has been more prominent compared to the channel of contagion moving from banks to sovereigns.
Providing an analysis of the legal and regulatory measures that Europe and the euro area have taken to mitigate the exposure of sovereigns to financial crises generated by commercial banks, this book draws attention to areas where improvements to the arsenal of tools hitherto introduced are either desirable or necessary. Chapters further explain - with recourse to economic and legal arguments - why the channel of contagion moving from sovereigns to commercial banks has proven harder to close, and explores ways in which progress could be made in the direction of closing it so as to avert the risk of future banking sector crises.
This work provides essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in sovereign debt crises and the euro-area banking system.