Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called for the establishment of a single European stock exchange, signalling German support for plans to unify the bloc’s capital markets.
“We need a kind of European stock exchange so that successful companies such as biotech firms from Germany do not have to go to the New York Stock Exchange,” said Merz in a speech to the Bundestag on Thursday. “Our companies need a sufficiently broad and deep capital market so that they can finance themselves better and, above all, faster.”
Merz’s comments come as his government recently agreed to intensify collaboration with France to advance the EU’s capital markets union (CMU), including by handing over powers to a single European supervisor — abandoning Berlin’s previous reluctance to shifting regulatory powers to EU bodies.