Making a Reality of Europe’s Capital Markets Union

In 2014, European Union leaders looked at the economic wreckage from the global financial and subsequent EU sovereign debt crises as an alarm to strengthen the continent’s capital markets architecture. EU nations still depend, in large part, on banks as suppliers of liquidity and financing. As policy makers learned, however, such major exposure to only one channel of funding can foster problems and financial instability. While EU officials conducted substantive work on developing a more sophisticated and connected banking platform via Economic and Monetary Union, comparatively little movement on a capital...