CMU progress stalled by political fragmentation and national self-interest
- —CMU was proposed in 2014; over a decade later, minimal progress due to EU member-state footdragging
- —France wants to keep everything in Paris via ESMA; Frankfurt Stock Exchange floats LSE merger which undercuts EU sovereignty goals
- —Euronext-Frankfurt merger is also struggling — ironically similar to the FCAS defence debacle
- —The E6 (Spain, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Estonia) represent ~60% of EU GDP and plan to proceed; others join later — but financial jobs in Milan, Madrid and Amsterdam could be devastated
EU-Inc proposal: better than nothing, but still disappoints on investor certainty
- —German Series A financing requires €58,954 in notary fees and 5+ hours of documents being read aloud — vs a DocuSign PDF in the UK or US #比較
- —EU-Inc proposal addresses founder-side friction (flexible funding, harmonised ESOP regime, fast digital process) but fails the investor test — 'on paper European, in practice national'
- —Notary requirement finally eliminated in the latest proposal, but the draft still layers 27 national bureaucratic solutions rather than sweeping them away
- —EU law courts are too slow (often years for rulings); EU Inc must update corporate law annually with direct input from founders and investors, as Delaware does #催化劑
What would actually fix European capital markets: unified regulation, not a single exchange
- —A single pan-European exchange achieves nothing by itself; the real fix is a centralised regulator (like the SEC) and unified taxation across member states
- —UCITS proves Europe can harmonise finance, but so long as Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid each want their own tax rate, capital will keep flowing to London and New York
- —To boost European equity financing: reduce listing costs and complexity, eliminate withholding tax disadvantages, and credibly improve Europe's image as a home for capital
- —Risk aversion in European and UK equity markets is cultural, top-down, and harder to fix than any policy lever — culture itself is a policy