Eighteen years of ECB operations: an assessment of unified monetary policy and banking supervision

the inflation targeting) but the level of such a target, as it may be that the actual 2% level is to lower a threshold to allow for measures expansionary enough to counteract significant turmoil. Also, extraordinary measures that are able to influence the term structure lowering long term rates, might enter the standard toolkit of the central bank as authorities have become now familiar with these instruments during the crisis and now data are available to study and understand the effects they produce.On the supervisory side, the exercise held in Europe until now were not able to achieve the same results as the 2009 SCAP did in the U.S. Many critics point to the lack of a credible backstop mechanism as the main source of such different outcomes (see Spargoli, 2013 and Acharya and Steffen, 2014). Difficulties to guarantee a credible public capital injection in the Eurozone are certainly higher than in the U.S., as reaching an agreement between different governments to pool enough capital to cover possible shortfalls of the overall system is bound to be a political hurdle extremely difficult to overcome. Lastly, to promote the synchronization of the business cycles, that, as proved in the first section, suffered a push towards asynchrony from the two crises, country specific structural reforms are much needed in order to smooth the divergences, where possible, both in the industrial system and in the interconnections between it and the banking structure. Along with this, and in this spirit, is time for fiscal policy (in this case