A long road to the Capital Markets Union

2023-12-06 11:49:02

How to strengthen the EU’s stock markets was the central point of discussion at the FESE conference. Image: FESE

A unified capital market is on the EU agenda. But the goal seems far away. More government commitment is required.

Since the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the Capital Markets Union has been one of the goals of the European Union – or the Capital Markets Union, as Petr Koblic, President of the Association of European Stock Exchanges, FESE, emphasized in his opening speech at this year’s association conference in Bilbao. The goal is not to create a central marketplace in the EU. The first action plan for the Capital Markets Union from 2015, 58 years after the Treaty of Rome, also mentioned the development and integration of the capital markets of the 28 member states in the plural. In the EU languages ​​it’s mixed up: sometimes it’s the singular, sometimes it’s the plural.

The action plan stated at the time that the European capital markets “remain comparatively underdeveloped and fragmented”. Although the European economy is as large as the American one, the stock markets are not even half the size and the bond markets are not even a third of the size on the other side of the Atlantic. This year’s FESE conference left the impression that progress was manageable given last year’s 7 percent market share of global IPOs.