Faced with Europe’s massive financing needs for its energy and digital transition, Bruno Le Maire calls on Thursday for the creation of a European savings product and pleads for the urgency of relaunching the capital markets union (CMU) .
My first objective, by 2027, is that we are able to offer a European savings product, with the same rules and the same taxation offered to all European citizens., declared Bruno Le Maire in a Bercy speech. The French Minister of the Economy was speaking ahead of the presentation of the conclusions of the Noyer mission, named after the honorary governor of the Bank of France Christian Noyer, charged by Bercy with overseeing the work and establishing recommendations to relaunch the UMC.
The Noyer mission underlines that the European Union will have to invest massively by 2030: ensuring the EU’s energy transition would require nearly 700 billion euros per year and the digital transition 125 billion euros. However, European savings constitute a deposit of 35,000 billion euros which could contribute to the financing of European projects.
It’s money that sits in bank accounts and is of no use when we need financing, argued Bruno Le Maire. This savings, although abundant, is also exported too much outside the Union, noted the Minister of the Economy.
This European savings product is one of the four recommendations from the Noyer mission report, written by actors from the private and public sector. This savings product would be labeled and mainly directed towards the European economy. It should also be reserved for long-term investments and would remain blocked until retirement, barring major life events.
Another recommendation of the mission: to relaunch the securitization market, this financial technique, which consists of transforming debts held by a company or a bank into more easily exchangeable financial securities. Securitization, to put it simply, is the transformation of receivables into a uniform product attractive to the markets, summarized Bruno Le Maire.
Finally, the authors of the report suggest that ESMA, the European Securities and Markets Authority, become the supervisor of supervisors, to compete with the SEC, the regulator of American financial markets.
If everyone does not want to move forward, we will move a few forward, warns Bruno Le Maire. I will not let a few States take the Capital Markets Union hostage, he concluded, while this project has barely seen the light of day for years due to the lack of a common vision, particularly in France and Germany.
Reproduction forbidden.