From the financial crisis to the Balance Sheet recession: an empirical analysis based on the National Accounts

Abstract

The crisis entitled as systemic, financial, sovereign debt or the balance sheet recession, seems to be prepared to survive, assuming several forms and dynamics. In fact, the actual systemic crisis makes clear the interconnections of all institutional sectors (mainly between the financial and the general governments sector) and highlights the relevance of the system of macro accounting (European System of Accounts - ESA) to be used for several purposes: as a system of information for analysing the economic and the financial context, to prevent the fiscal distress and as a framework to make possible the national and the supranational governance and regulation. The systemic nature of the financial crisis and its dynamics are the fundamentals of this paper and the observation framework, applied to five countries of the Euro Area, is sustained by the (ESA2010) and by the supplementary tables for reporting government interventions to support financial institutions. The ratios construction and analysis is supported by the supranational governance framework point of view for macroeconomic imbalances procedure (MIP). In fact, the MIP framework, designed with several and diversified indicators is, in crisis time, fundamental for the construction of the financial stability, the growth and the employment. In this paper it is underlined the fragility of some Euro Area Member States, mostly when in the absence of the European Central Bank as a lender of last resort. I conclude with two remarks: the so called “deadly embrace” between the general government and the financial sector is, nowadays, in a financial systemic crisis context, accompanied by a balance sheet recession, concerning all the institutional sectors of a country and its interactions with the Rest of the World; and the national and international governance strategies must be guided by the concern that all the sectors are too big to fall.