August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
Japan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two Decades
August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
Japan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two DecadesJapan Becomes Europe’s Closest Security Partner in AsiaCan Europe’s New Zealand Deal Anchor It in the Pacific?Chip Research Binds Europe and South Korea CloserMinimum Prices Replace Tariffs in Europe’s China Car DealBrussels and Beijing Keep Talking While the Trade Gap WidensKorean Weapons and EU Loans Now Bankroll Europe’s RearmamentNew EU Gas Market Rules Take Effect With Consumer SafeguardsDeforestation Regulation Holds Its December Deadline Despite CutsDigital Omnibus Delays Europe’s High-Risk AI Deadline to 2027Europe’s Schools Confront a Widening Basic Skills GapRule of Law Report Finds Progress but Trust Still LagsIRIS2 Gains 66 Satellites as Brussels Signs the Rollout DealNature Restoration Plans Come Due as Member States Race a DeadlineECB Rates Hold at 2.25 Percent as Frankfurt Waits on the DataEU Budget Talks Turn to Cohesion as Ireland Takes OverWildfire Response Stretches Europe’s Emergency Fleet ThinCan Europe’s Quantum Plan Match Its Big Ambitions?Armenia Edges West as Moscow’s Grip Slips AwayEurope Inherits the World’s Aid Bill It Cannot Fully PayAir Passenger Rights Get Their First Overhaul in Two Decades

Reviving Securitisation Sits at the Heart of Europe’s Savings Push

Ingrid Kittelsen
Policy Reporter, Agriculture and Food Security

Luxembourg: Europe holds a vast pool of household savings and struggles to turn it into the investment its economy needs, a mismatch that has become the animating worry of the Union’s financial policymakers. The answer they have settled on carries an unglamorous name, the Savings and Investments Union, and its first concrete deliverable is an attempt to revive a market that Europe has treated with suspicion since the financial crisis: securitisation.

The scale of the ambition is set by numbers drawn from the influential competitiveness report that has shaped the debate, which put the Union’s additional investment needs at something approaching eight hundred billion euros a year by the end of the decade. Bank lending and public budgets cannot bridge a gap of that size alone, and officials argue that deeper, more integrated capital markets are the only realistic way to mobilise the continent’s savings and channel them toward strategic priorities from energy to defence.

Securitisation, the practice of bundling loans into tradable securities, is central to that logic because it lets banks move assets off their books and free up capacity to lend anew. The Commission tabled proposals to overhaul the framework in the summer, and in December the Council agreed its negotiating position. The thrust is to recalibrate the capital that banks and insurers must hold against securitised assets so that genuinely low-risk instruments are treated more proportionately, while preserving a safer category and the established label for simple, transparent and standardised transactions. The package also seeks to reduce supervisory fragmentation and strengthen the hand of the Union’s markets regulator.

The case for acting is that Europe’s securitisation market has languished at a fraction of its pre-crisis size and a sliver of its American counterpart, leaving banks more constrained and borrowers more dependent on a narrow set of lenders. Supervisors themselves have begun describing banks not merely as intermediaries but as strategic enablers of the wider capital market, a notable shift in tone from an institution built to guard against excess.

That shift is exactly what makes critics wary. Securitisation was at the centre of the last financial crisis, when opaque bundles of poor-quality loans spread losses through the system in ways few had understood. Sceptics warn that loosening capital requirements, even for assets labelled low-risk, risks relearning old lessons, and that the safeguards built into the current rules exist for good reason. Supporters respond that the reformed European framework is far more conservative than the pre-crisis American model, with transparency standards and risk-retention rules designed to keep originators exposed to the loans they sell.

The legislation now moves toward negotiation between the Council and the Parliament, where the calibration of capital charges will be fought over line by line. How that balance is struck will determine whether the savings union becomes the financing engine its architects envisage or another well-intentioned framework that markets quietly ignore.

Comments