In order to extract economic criteria for European fiscal federalism, Chapter 3 examines public accounts statistics and the economic literature on EMU from 1992 through the European sovereign debt crisis. It follows a chain of macroeconomic indicators running from nominal interest-rate convergence to the sovereign debt crisis. It examines nominal interest-rate convergence; structural determinants of sovereign bond yields; real interest rates; private-sector domestic credit; cross-border credit flows; consolidated banking claims; current-account imbalances; real effective exchange-rates; public and private-sector debt; the sovereign-bank feedback loop; and fiscal policy. The analysis finds that the Euro Crisis was a private debt crisis, not a public one. The causa sine qua non of the crisis is a severe mispricing of private and public debt caused by a failure of Articles 121-126 TFEU to induce markets to differentiate between sovereign borrowers under a (now realised) bailout expectation – not sovereign debt.

The book ends with two conclusions: First, Member State fiscal sovereignty is a permanent constitutional constraint upon the application of fiscal federalism theory in the European Union. Second, hard budget constraints and market discipline are indispensable for the guiding principles of price stability and fiscal discipline in a decentralised federation bound by the fiscal sovereignty of its Member States. In sum, the model chosen for European fiscal federalism must preserve the fiscal sovereignty of its constitutional democracies, and it must have market discipline under hard budget constraints. As for the selection of an appropriate model for EU fiscal federalism, this book proposes that three constitutional tests for fiscal sovereignty identified in Chapter 1, and the five determinates of fiscal discipline identified in Chapter 8, provide an intersecting set of criteria for determining which models of fiscal federalism are compatible and implementable within the boundaries of the European legal order.