Europe’s biggest financial rule making spree since the creation of its single market more than 20 years ago reached its finale yesterday with the adoption of a slew of landmark reforms designed to make banks safer and financial markets more transparent.
It marks the climax of a fraught four-year drive to end the era of taxpayer bailouts and fuse together control of eurozone lenders under a banking union. The votes in the European parliament cap the bloc’s lawmaking response to a crisis that spread from the financial turmoil of 2008 to leave at one stage the very existence of the euro in doubt.
The centrepiece of the reforms was an EU-wide rule book to ensure shareholders and bondholders and not taxpayers are first in line to pay for bank rescues. Within the banking union a common resolution system will enforce those rules – forcing eurozone states to release their grip over domestic champions.