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On 18 December 2010, ten years ago, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa passed away. He was an economist with the Bank of Italy, an Italian and European civil servant, a member of the @ecb's very first board, and an Italian MinFin) [short thread]
He was neither an ordinary bureaucrat nor an ordinary politician. He was a thinker. At each juncture of his long career, he identified with extraordinary acuteness the fault lines in the policy machinery of the time and outlined the reforms the situation called for.
He was the one who pointed out that the EU's single market for capital would undermine prevailing monetary arrangements and that Europe had to choose between floating exchange rates and the euro.
At the ECB, he disputed the then-consensual view that the priority was to protect the central bank against pressures from politicians. He was aware that the absence of a fiscal counterpart did not make the ECB stronger, but weaker, and repeatedly asked "who is my minister?"
He challenged the conventional policy wisdom that a monetary union did not require a financial union and that euro-area banks could continue being supervised by national authorities. He warned, but only the crisis vindicated his views (he did not see it).
He was incredibly kind, modest and thoughtful. As a man of soft words and hard thoughts, he would have hated the decade of hard words and soft thoughts we just went through.
It is a great honour to be the holder of the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa chair created by his Italian friends at the @EuropeanUni.
