Europe Must Refocus Capital-Markets-Union Efforts, Lagarde Says

The European Union needs to ramp up efforts to unify its fragmented financial infrastructure, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said in an op-ed for the Economist.

“The EU has spent years trying to build a ‘capital markets union,’” she wrote. “Since 2015, there have been more than 55 regulatory proposals and 50 non-legislative initiatives. But a broad agenda has led to little progress. Europe must refocus, exposing the key blockages in the financing pipeline and identifying a smaller number of solutions with the highest return.”

Her comments echo earlier remarks on the bloc’s inertia over capital markets, an area ...