ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the analysis of discursive parallels – specifically, conceptual problems – between financial market integration in the European Union (EU) and economic theory. This problem encompasses what ‘the market’ is, how it is to be ‘integrated’, and the nature and role of ‘money’ as infrastructure of the fully integrated market. As shown in previous chapters, the EU’s legal framework has imported this epistemic problem along with the competitive conception of the market as described in economic theory – as a ‘level playing field’ for private exchange, under free, fair, and ideally unrestrained competition. This chapter shows how this problem manifests itself in European financial market integration processes, specifically, in two otherwise disconnected areas of European Central Bank (ECB) activity: (a) the provision of central bank credit for the purpose of financial transaction settlement on the Target2-Securities (T2S) platform and (b) the conduct of ordinary monetary policy in the Eurozone. It becomes clear that while the specific manifestations of the problem can be stabilised through legal, technical, and other means, the problem remains latent and may manifest itself again in unexpected ways, as happened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
