August 9, 2026

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The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

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New 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 DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before AntalyaNew 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 DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before Antalya
August 9, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • Strategic Insight

LATEST
New 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 DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before AntalyaNew 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 DecadesErasmus Opens a 5 Billion Euro Round for Skills and MobilityCeuta Crisis Pushes the EU Toward Faster Migrant ReturnsBulky Parcels Face a Packaging Crackdown From August 12Can Europe Build Its Drone Wall Before 2030 Arrives?Indonesia’s Trade Deal With Europe Nears Its Final SignatureEurope Leans on Beijing to Keep Climate Talks Alive Before Antalya

Why Europe’s 10 Trillion In Savings Stays In The Bank

Zainab Mirza
Research Fellow, Financial Services and Banking

Brussels: Europe is not a poor continent that lacks the means to invest in its own future. It is a wealthy one that keeps its money in the wrong place. An estimated 10 trillion euros of household savings sit in low-yield bank deposits across the Union, earning little for the families who hold them and financing little of the investment the bloc says it urgently needs. The Savings and Investments Union, the relabelled and broadened successor to the long-stalled capital markets union, is the EU’s latest attempt to coax that money into productive use. A year into the effort, the diagnosis is sharper than ever and the political will still falls short of it.

The economic case is hard to dispute. American households hold far more of their wealth in equities and funds, capturing returns that compound over decades, while European savers cluster in deposits and lose ground to inflation. For companies, the consequence is a shallow pool of risk capital. A European firm that wants to scale often finds deeper, more liquid markets in the United States, and many eventually list or relocate there. The result is a slow drain of ambition and ownership at precisely the moment the Union is trying to finance a green transition, a digital build-out and a rearmament it cannot pay for from public budgets alone.

The Savings and Investments Union responds on several fronts at once. It seeks to revive securitisation, the packaging of loans into tradable assets that frees bank balance sheets to lend again, an instrument tarnished by the 2008 crisis but central to deep capital markets. It aims to simplify the rules for venture capital, with a review of the European venture capital fund regulation due later in 2026. And it presses, most controversially, for stronger central supervision, with the bloc’s six largest economies pushing to transfer certain powers to the European Securities and Markets Authority so that capital can flow across a genuinely single market rather than 27 partly walled-off ones.

That supervisory question is where ambition meets the limits of sovereignty. Fragmentation is not an accident of history but the product of national choices, national champions and national regulators reluctant to cede authority over their financial sectors. Smaller member states fear that centralising oversight in a single agency would hand influence to the largest markets and erode home-grown finance. Their caution is understandable, and it is also the precise reason the capital markets union languished for the better part of a decade. Rebranding the project has sharpened the language but not yet dissolved the deadlock.

Even the demand side is harder than it looks. Persuading risk-averse savers to move from deposits into markets is a question of culture, trust and tax incentives as much as regulation. Several governments have floated pan-European savings and investment accounts with favourable tax treatment, but tax is a jealously guarded national power, and a patchwork of incentives could deepen fragmentation rather than ease it. A saver in one country may enjoy generous relief while a neighbour gets none, hardly the level playing field the Union claims to want.

There are reasons for cautious optimism. The push from the largest economies gives the project political weight it previously lacked, and even bank supervisors, once wary of capital markets as a rival to lending, now frame banks as strategic enablers of the shift rather than its casualties. Securitisation reform and the venture capital review are concrete, near-term steps rather than aspirational targets, and a mid-term review in 2027 will at least force an honest reckoning with progress.

Yet the central truth has not changed since the capital markets union was first proposed. Deep, integrated markets require member states to surrender a measure of control they have always protected. Until that political bargain is struck, Europe’s 10 trillion euros will keep doing what it does best, which is sitting safely in the bank, financing very little and quietly losing value while the continent debates how to set it free.

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