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D-day for EU’s battle plan to rival Wall Street

The EU will on Thursday unveil plans to supercharge its finance industry, tearing up swathes of rules in a bid to take on Wall Street.

The package, which is massive in scope and ambition, would amend at least 10 financial laws to crack down on protectionism and unclog the EU’s financial plumbing.

But Brussels’ ambitions to create a U.S.-style financial market will reopen political wounds, especially its plan to create a powerful EU watchdog for financial markets. Despite the bloc’s urgent need for private investment, progress could be bogged down by political divisions over the strategy.

“If we’re stuck in a never-ending discussion about how to organize supervision … that will not take us closer to our objective,” Swedish Minister for Financial Markets Niklas Wykman said.

The Commission’s overarching goal is to remove barriers to investment in the bloc, allowing more money to flow to struggling businesses so the EU can better keep up with economic powerhouses like the U.S. and China. With national budgets under strain from a bruising pandemic and years of inflation, Brussels is hoping to unlock €11 trillion in cash savings held by EU citizens in their bank accounts to breathe life into the economy.

It plans to do that by breaking down technical barriers and busting protectionism between the EU’s 27 national money markets, as well as by changing rules that create national barriers to finance flows and by creating a powerful EU watchdog for financial markets.

The EU’s finance chief, Maria Luís Albuquerque, who has led work on the revamp, told POLITICO in an interview: “It’s going to be a difficult discussion, of course, but these are the ones worth having, right?” | Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images

Some capitals, though, view the proposal as a power grab and are determined to keep oversight of financial markets at the national level. And there are other tweaks in the package that will dredge up painful recent debates over issues like crypto rules or trading data.

Countries are already warning that the Commission should keep its nose out of their business. Sweden, the EU’s best-in-class country for financial markets, has warned the EU executive not to interfere with any rules but instead to focus on boosting the appetite of EU citizens to invest in products like stocks and bonds, rather than parking their cash in savings accounts.

Supervision is “not the problem and it’s not the solution to the problem,” Wykman told POLITICO.

Among other ideas the Commission was mulling ahead of the official publication — according to documents seen by POLITICO — are a stronger EU-wide public ‘ticker tape’ of trading data, an expanded pilot program for decentralized finance to include all products and crypto firms, and a reduction in paperwork to make it easier to sell investment funds across the EU.

The plans are sure to please some industry players, like stock exchanges or central securities-depositary groups that operate in multiple EU countries. But they will also inevitably be opposed by others, such as asset managers who are reluctant to be subject to increased EU oversight, or stock exchanges that don’t want to see their pricey trading data services undercut by a stronger public EU ticker tape.

The technical shifts, plus the idea of an EU-wide watchdog, are ambitious but are also reminders of how limited the Commission’s powers are compared those deployed by EU countries at the national level.

The Commission can’t make game-changing reforms in areas like national pensions, taxation or insolvency law for businesses, all of which are major obstacles to a single money market. Nor will many national governments spend the political capital needed to make domestic reforms for the sake of the EU economy.

Nonetheless, the Commission is sticking to its guns. The EU’s finance chief, Maria Luís Albuquerque, who has led work on the revamp, told POLITICO in an interview: “It’s going to be a difficult discussion, of course, but these are the ones worth having, right?”

LP Staff Writers

Writers at Lord’s Press come from a range of professional backgrounds, including history, diplomacy, heraldry, and public administration. Many publish anonymously or under initials—a practice that reflects the publication’s long-standing emphasis on discretion and editorial objectivity. While they bring expertise in European nobility, protocol, and archival research, their role is not to opine, but to document. Their focus remains on accuracy, historical integrity, and the preservation of events and individuals whose significance might otherwise go unrecorded.

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