A união bancária e o paradigma da estabilidade

: crise financeira e regulação

Abstract

The European Banking Union (EBU) confronts its roots in the post-2008 financial crisis, its systemic intentionality visible in the new regulatory frontiers opened since then at international and EU levels, and the paradigm of stability as an idiosyncratic feature of the European integration. However, just as it is not possible to understand the intentionality of the EBU without acknowledging the crisis, it is also not possible to understand it disconnected from the integration model and its stabilizing purpose within the framework of the available solidarity, nor detached from bank-sovereign systemic relations and cross-border activities of financial institutions. In this sense, the research discusses whether the EBU, in its configuration, structure and instruments, accomplishes the purpose of systemic stabilization, identifies the potential factors of functional disability, and the ways for them to be overcome. In addition, three important assumptions are considered: (i) the stabilizing limitations of the European integration model; (ii) the inherent (idiosyncratic) instability of the financial system; and (iii) the artificiality of the boundaries between the latter (stricto sensu) and public finance, determining the two-way contagion (bank-sovereign) that EBU intends to address. For this purpose, the (potential) stabilizing objective of the EBU in its three functions and respective instruments is also assessed: crisis prevention, management, and extinction, given its connection to those assumptions. Crisis prevention answers, e.g., to the inherent fragility of the financial system, crisis management highlights the stabilizing limitations of EU integration, and crisis extinction, in the same vein, exposes the artificiality of the boundaries.

Date of Award	6 Jun 2025
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Patrícia Fragoso Martins (Supervisor)