The capital markets union is the first of three projects – alongside the digital single market and energy union initiatives – with which the Juncker Commission aims to strengthen the EU single market. A
green paper
on building a capital markets union (CMU), unveiled on 18 February, aims at engaging the stakeholders in a dialogue on possible ways to remove the barriers between investors’ money and investment opportunities.
This is only a first step. “Building a single market for capital…
Securitisation
The Commission has also launched two complementary consultations, one on the review of the prospectus directive, the other on a EU framework for securitisation. On the latter, Jonathan Hill insisted on the Commission’s intention to develop a transparent, simple and standardised market for high-quality securitisation. “We will not be going back to the bad old days of sub-prime mortgages. Our door will remain firmly closed for highly complex, opaque and risky securitisation instruments, which were part of the crisis,” he said. Frederic Hache, head of policy analysis at Finance Watch, remained cautious: “Recent initiatives to define transparent and simple securitisation go in the right direction but are not tight enough to make securitisation truly simple and robust again.”
