Mara Monti is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE European Institute, London, UK. She spent her carrier as a journalist in the financial field. She completed an MSc (Econ) in Politics of the World Economy at the LSE and graduated in Economics cum laude at Bologna University, Italy. During her carrier, she tracked the financial crisis, starting in the US with the subprime bubble, followed by the Lehman default and the European sovereign downfall. Furthermore, she wrote a comprehensive series of articles about domestic financial and banking scandals. She has written extensively about the sovereign crisis and bailout in Greece, Ireland and Spain, the ECB’s monetary policy and its non-conventional instruments. As a Visiting Fellow at the LSE, she has written extensively on the issue of banking crises and the monetary union.