Renée V. Rueff

Renée V. Rueff spent a decade at the European Central Bank during the period when European monetary union was stress-tested to its structural limits. She was not present at the creation of the euro; she arrived in time to watch it nearly come apart, and to understand precisely why it held together when it did and why the conditions that held it together are now under pressure again.

Her institutional territory is the architecture of European monetary transmission; specifically the TARGET2 payment system that clears euro transactions across member states, the sovereign spread dynamics that signal when the market believes the union is under stress, and the ECB's asset purchase programmes that have kept those spreads within manageable bounds. She watched the ECB become, through necessity, a fiscal actor operating under monetary cover. She writes about what happens when a private stablecoin payment layer is introduced into a monetary union already operating at the edge of its design parameters.

The Bank of England functions in her work as the adjacent case study; the major European currency that exited the monetary union and must now navigate the stablecoin transition without the ECB backstop, without the TARGET2 clearing system, and with a reserve currency already declining in global use before the GENIUS Act changed the competitive landscape. She writes from Frankfurt.