The Florence School of Banking and Finance at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies and the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London, in cooperation with BAFFI CAREFIN at Bocconi University and with the kind support of the European Investment Bank Institute, organised on 26 April 2018 a conference entitled 'Institutions and the Crisis'. This event follows the tradition, established in 2011, to gather yearly in Florence the leading economists, lawyers, political scientists and policy makers to discuss Europe's economic and financial governance, in the light of the most pressing policy priorities, challenges and future prospects. In particular, this year's conference was convened to critically analyse, review and debate the most salient elements and gaps of Europe's post-crisis institutional architecture. The event was opened by the first panel, which looked back at the way the EU Institutions managed the financial crisis and drew analytical and practical insights from both a research and public policy perspective. Discussions in the panel evaluated the European crisis management, going beyond the established view that Europe did 'too little too late'. The panellists reflected on the capacity of EU institutions and instruments to manage interdependencies stemming from a common currency. The second panel discussed the role of the various European courts in tackling the recent financial crisis, particularly assessing how they discussed, challenged and legitimized the EU's key crisis response mechanisms and decisions. Speakers discussed whether courts are likely to be effective enforcement mechanisms for the new fiscal rules and assessed how judicial control interfered with crisis decisions by other public authorities. The discussion in the final panel was focused on the Eurozone's future institutional prospects, looking at the crucial reform steps necessary to make the EMU and the euro sustainable and 'future-proof ', discussing the existence of possible alternatives for ensuring the stability of the Euro, as well as addressing the difficult balance between risk-reduction and risk-sharing measures that Europe must find in the current populist context, to stay on course in EMU reform. The event follows a 2017 conference entitled 'The Changing Geography of Finance and Regulation in Europe', a 2016 conference entitled 'Filling the Gaps in Governance: The Case of Europe,' a 2015 conference entitled 'The New Financial Architecture in the Eurozone,' a 2014 conference entitled 'Bearing the Losses from Bank and Sovereign Default in the Eurozone', a 2013 conference 'Political, Fiscal and Banking Union in the Eurozone,' a 2012 conference, 'Governance for the Eurozone: Integration or Disintegration, and that of 2011, 'Life in the Eurozone With or Without Sovereign Default.' As with all the previous conferences, the debate after each panel and was lively and thoughtful. We prefer not to take a stance here on any of the issues but simply provide in this book the contributions by individual speakers and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.
