At the initiative of their German counterpart, Lars Klingbeil, the finance ministers of the six largest economies in the European Union - Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands - discussed how to mobilise private savings to finance productive investment in the EU on Monday 16 February, on the sidelines of the Eurogroup meeting.
Mr Klingbeil said that his initiative was intended to inject a new “tempo” into work on the integration of European capital markets, with the ultimate aim of “finding solutions for the whole of Europe” and strengthening “European sovereignty”. “Our current pace at European level is not equal to the challenge”, he stressed, pointing to the opportunity to attract “international investors (wishing) to diversify further” to Europe.
The President of the Eurogroup, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, said that Mr Klingbeil had explained to the ministers the work of this “informal and temporary” group, which is designed to bring positions together on key economic priorities. He did not see any “threat” in this initiative, which in his view is “auxiliary” to the work already underway within the Ecofin Council and the Eurogroup, stressing the importance of “transparency”.
The six ministers are expected to meet regularly by videoconference or in person. At their next meeting, on 9 March, they will consider ways of strengthening the euro’s international role and making defence investment more effective.
The French minister, Roland Lescure, said he hoped that this informal group would act as a “spur to the rest of the EU to accelerate, facilitate, simplify and deepen” the work, by setting “ambitious objectives and precise deadlines”, perhaps by the end of 2026, on issues such as the European “supervision” of systemic financial players.
Our approach is to use our “political weight” to speed up the savings and investment union project, added Dutch minister Eelco Heinen, assuring that the objective was to move forward with twenty-seven Member States.
In the same vein, the Polish minister, Andrzej Domański, advocated the development of “new tools” to facilitate private investment in the EU.
Spain, represented by its deputy minister, highlighted the importance of the ‘European Competitiveness Lab’, an informal meeting of seven euro area countries (Spain, Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Estonia) to set up pioneering projects on issues relating to the integration of capital markets, such as a European platform for securitisation (see EUROPE 13727/9) and a European label for savings products (see EUROPE 13654/20). (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)