The German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz said she would start a new attempt with France to get out of the deadlock a ten -year attempt European Union To deepen its capital markets and improve business access to funding.
Mertz told Berlin today (6.6.2025) that the EU has been overly focused on “liability and deposit regimes”. “I will now take initiatives with the French government to do this differently and better,” he said.
“Conditions should be created for European companies to choose to sell shares to the public in Europe instead of choosing US Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange,” he added.
Mertz’s predecessor in Chancellor, Social Democrat Odf Saltz, was also an enthusiastic supporter of a deeper EU capital market union and remains to be seen whether Mertz’s new effort is more likely to succeed where Salts failed.
Progress was generally slow, as Member States clashed over issues such as single supervision or taxation, even while politicians warned that the demands of green transition made the plan more urgent.
With the margins of budget spending on much of Europe, the exploitation of savings is the key to funding the economy and boosting the competitiveness of the region.
To try to bypass the impasse, some countries, including France and Germany, are working on a new initiative to help channel more savings to the economy.
“With 450 million consumers in Europe, we are older than the US and Canada together,” Merz said. “Whatever they can do, we can do it too.”