Post-crisis regulation may take a third form

Post-crisis regulatory activism in the EU from 2015 onward may take the form of market-making rather than market-saving. Building a European securities market in a manner potentially helpful to small and medium enterprises would provide a politically navigable path, relating constructively to employment and economic justice. By contrast, quantitative easing manifestly inflates elite assets and deepens inequality, which at a time of deepening recession in Europe remains attractive only to die-hard neoliberals. Certainly it is difficult to reconcile current regulatory rhetoric on employment – the theme of central bankers’ 2014 Jackson Hole meeting – with asset-frothing and poverty-causing policies. It is easier to read that theme in terms of forward guidance in the sense of agenda reconstruction. Regulators' close cooperation in linguistic framing, within which managed policy divergences are possible, results from collective acknowledgement that one size may not fit all.