European savings and investment: towards new common instruments?

🎯 Europe does not have a savings problem — it has an allocation problem.
Europe has abundant savings (≈ €35 trillion), but it remains under-invested in our real economy. Some of it goes to finance innovation elsewhere (particularly in the United States), and when it returns to Europe, it is often via American management players. The challenge for the Savings & Investment Union is therefore to redirect these savings towards our businesses, our infrastructure and our transitions rather than financing the growth of others.

🧭 A ‘fifth freedom’ to support innovation, skills and intangible assets.
As Enrico Letta pointed out, the internal market must be complemented by adding freedom of movement for knowledge, skills and innovation. Today, legal and prudential fragmentation is hampering risk-taking, industrialisation and technological advancement. Creating simple, common European investment tools (e.g. a European PEA/ISA) would make it possible to link household savings to long-term investment needs, particularly in the climate and digital sectors.

🤝 To move forward, priority must be given to simplification and the coalition of actors.
The issue is not to produce new regulations, but to make what already exists coherent, clear and unified: financial supervision, clearing houses, securitisation, insolvency rules. Above all, as Fabrizio Pagani and Bertrand Dumont have pointed out, governments cannot do this alone: coordinated action is needed from financial markets, businesses, investors and European institutions.

To read the note : https://institutdelors.eu/publications/investissez-dabord-en-europe/