• Eurozone crisis
• Financial flows
• Current account imbalances
• Competitiveness
• European integration

The 'Consensus View' on the Eurozone crisis agrees on a common narrative over its origins: current account imbalances, resulting from divergences in competitiveness among Eurozone countries, triggered a ‘sudden stop’ of capital flows towards peripheral countries. This dissertation instead argues that the mainstream interpretation is ridden with misconceptions. An 'Alternative View' is therefore presented, one that sees in the excess of gross financial flows, favoured by capital liberalisation and the elimination of the exchange-rate risk made possible by the establishment of the monetary union, the ultimate cause of trade imbalances. Domestic demand in peripheral countries was inflated by an unsustainable dynamic of private credit and asset prices, to which cross-border flows contributed substantially. From this different perspective, the Eurozone crisis should be conceived mainly as a financial crisis with structural causes linked to its institutional configuration and to the nature of its integration process. This dissertation therefore attempts to give theoretical and empirical support to the alternative hypothesis, by concentrating in particular on a comparison between Germany and Spain.