This talk revisited main patterns of capital flows over the last 150 years, as well approaches to their stabilisation attempted at different time periods.
The European solutions of such a stabilisation problem leading to the establishment of the Euro zone, notably the Delors Report of the 1989 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, are in fact deeply rooted in such historical arrangements as the Gold Standard of the second half of the XIX century, the Latin Monetary Union before WWI, the gold-exchange standard of the second half of the 1920s, the European Payment Union of the 1950s, the Bretton-Woods system of exchange rates of the 1960s, the "snakes" of the 1970s, and, finally, the European Monetary System of the 1980s.
The major political lesson of the aforementioned arrangements is that in the world of unlimited capital mobility and parliamentary democracy, limited measures at coordinated intervention in the financial markets and political integration are bound to be unsuccessful.
Thus, the ultimate resolution of the ongoing Greek crisis hinges upon even tighter integration within the European space, implying an eventual coordination of fiscal policies and redistribution of excess reserves from surplus to deficit countries.
The talk also reviewed a few immediate measures at solving the crisis attempted by the European Central Bank.
