The recent financial and sovereign debt crisis urgently re-proposes the issue of identifying suitable interventions aimed at strengthening common economic governance and budgetary policy surveillance. Starting from May 2010, the European Central Bank has adopted various measures (from the first "Security Market Programme" up to the most recent "Long Term Refinancing Operations" plan) to deal with the exceptional events that occurred in the financial markets; the regulation has also been modified by preparing a vast range of legislative interventions. Examining the effective capacity of the new Community legal acts to succeed in correcting and preventing macroeconomic imbalances is an inescapable task of research with the intention of overcoming the difficulties of the present historical moment.
In this context, the Greek crisis is of particular importance, highlighting various points of weakness in the construction of the community, destined to fuel the doubts of an ever latent Euroscepticism. Furthermore, particular attention must be paid to the delicate role of "rating agencies", also in relation to the possibility of subjecting them to adequate forms of supervision by the competent public authorities; in fact, the current regulation has not proved to be satisfactory, whereas reforms more in line with those recently adopted in the USA could produce positive results.
The need for rigorous and sustainable fiscal policies remains central, as does the need for appropriate macroeconomic surveillance and moral hazard prevention mechanisms. The Six Pack and the Fiscal Compact Treaty can be seen as important steps in the right direction, but certainly not as definitive solutions. Extraordinary interventions, circumscribed by their dimension as short-term solutions, reveal limited capacity in restoring correct transmission mechanisms of monetary policy, the implementation of other wide-ranging intervention reforms, considered in this work, appears indispensable. Fundamentally, the need to proceed in a European context with a cultural innovation, based on a logic of solidarity applicable in reference to behavioral rigor and merit, is underlined; this is the prerequisite for more advanced forms of integration not conceivable in the past. The awareness that, in the event of failure, the dissolution of the Union or, at least, the impossibility for the latter to continue to exist in its current set-up will have to be the guide.
