A network of national AMCs - part of the solution to the legacy of the financial crisis and the coronavirus crisis?

The financial crisis, the debt crisis and subsequently the coronavirus crisis have put intense pressure on monetary, macroprudential and fiscal policy in a short period of time. Having learned from the financial crisis ten years ago, institutions are not hesitating to provide huge support to their economies - central banks are helping with unconventional instruments and governments are rapidly taking on debt to ensure adequate funding for compensation packages for their restrictive measures. It is more difficult to come up with a solution across the countries of the euro area, where the ECB's single monetary policy and the ESRB's efforts to pursue a common approach to macroprudential policy come up against nineteen formally independent national fiscal policies. In this situation, unless the coronavirus crisis quickly becomes a thing of the past, there is a danger that the non-performing loans (NPLs) in financial institutions' balance sheets (especially in the euro area) will cause a financial crisis. To avert such a crisis, it might be appropriate to create a network of national asset management companies (AMCs) to help tackle the rise in NPLs on a purely market basis. If the problems in the banking sector were to reach truly intolerable levels, it may even be necessary to resort to a radical solution involving stateestablished specialised institutions in the countries concerned. History offers a few examples. The aim of this article is to bring this (still sensitive) discussion to the fore and provide a schematic depiction of the principle on which AMCs operate.