A macro-financial model of the Eurozone architecture embedded in the global offshore US-Dollar system

Monetary union has been a centerpiece of the European integration project. The design of the Eurozone 1.0 (1999-2009) subordinated national central banks to the supranational ECB but it neither introduced a supranational fiscal institution nor did it harmonize Eurozone banking systems. The historically unprecedented monetary reform was met with widespread skepticism from the start. The Eurocrisis (2009-12) seemed to prove critics right. Despite profound changes in the Eurozone 2.0 (since 2012), it is a commonplace to describe the Eurozone architecture as ill-constructed and unfinished.Monetary architecture, however, is not a well-defined term, and there is no consensus what the Eurozone architecture is beyond being a metaphor. Credit money systems are often analyzed with inapt categories based on simplified fiat or commodity money theories. Criteria for what makes a monetary architecture functional and complete resort to 1950s-style national monetary systems as normative benchmarks that are at odds with the realities of financial globalization and miss out on shadow banking and offshore money as facts of our age.Against this backdrop, this study comprehensively defines monetary architecture and presents a macro-financial model of the Eurozone architecture.