During the past 25 years, the European Union (EU) has accumulated a significant economic performance gap with the rest of the world, particularly the United States (US). One of the most striking aspects of this disparity, as this scoreboard shows, is the persistent difference in growth, productivity, and investment levels. The economic policy choices made by many European Member States, most often geared towards increasing demand to the detriment of productive investment – encouraged by persistently low or even negative real interest rates – as well as the inadequacies of certain EU policies and structural problems in Europe (demographic slowdown, energy dependency in particular) explain this economic stall. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the subsequent Sovereign Debt Crisis in Europe, the more recent Covid-19 pandemic, and the Russian war in Ukraine have all exposed and exacerbated these underlying issues. After periods of turbulence and a return to greater coherence, the Monetary Union is once again at a critical juncture. The euro’s successes cannot mask its weaknesses. […]