Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the 34th European Banking Congress: “Out of the Comfort Zone: Europe and the New World Order”

Frankfurt am Main, 22 November 2024

At last year’s conference, I spoke about Europe’s fragmented capital markets and the urgent need for us to integrate them.

The main thrust of my argument was that Europe was facing transformative changes that came with huge financing needs, and that we would not succeed without mobilising private capital much more effectively.

I called for a “Kantian shift” in how we approach the capital markets union (CMU) project, moving away from bottom-up harmonisation to top-down integration.^[1]

But as Martin Luther King said, “we are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.” And in that time, the urgency to integrate our capital markets has risen.

Since last year, Europe’s declining innovation position has come more clearly to light. The technology gap between the United States and Europe is now…