To date, the rescue, supervision and the closure of banks has been a matter for individual EU states - a setup that has brought some nations to the brink of the bankruptcy. A few weeks ago, EU countries agreed on who should pay first if a bank goes bankrupt, deciding to initially put large shareholders on the line. Now, the commission has proposed a European resolution authority that would be able to centrally order the closure of a bank if it can no longer be saved. This is how the EU plans to spare the taxpayer from the responsibility of saving failing banks in the eurozone: a common European banking supervisory body would be set up at the European Central Bank (ECB), and banks would have to contribute to a common fund amounting to 60 or 70 billion euros after a decade. But for the government in Berlin, the proposition of transferring powers to Brussels is out of the question.