Capital Markets Union: An ambitious goal, but few quick wins

The creation of a European Capital Markets Union (CMU) aims to establishing a single market for capital to complement bank financing. In this paper, we make a quantitative assessment of the European stock, bond and securitisation markets to look at the CMU’s potential. Our results reveal that liquidity and IPO trends in European stock markets are similar to those in the US. However, market integration has slowed down in recent years, which the CMU could counter by harmonising company, securities and insolvency laws. European corporate bond markets have become a notable alternative to bank lending but their investor base remains restricted, which the CMU should address. The securitisation market in Europe has performed well throughout the crises and its revival is a sine qua non for lending to regain traction, especially to SMEs. The CMU should thus target a less punitive regulatory treatment for this market segment.