Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-03-11-Speech-2-316"
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"en.20080311.32.2-316"2
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"Madam President, I will try to be very brief, but I wanted to make a few brief comments on some of the speeches that have been made.
First of all, it is clear that there is asymmetry between the national structure of supervisors, the financial supervision structures, and the growing importance of the supranational institutions, and the global, rather than just the European dimension, of the financial markets and financial activity. This asymmetry causes tension and demands a response from the European institutions, from the Commission and from the Council and Parliament. We are not going to discuss this, as I think that we are all in agreement on it.
Secondly, I am not so much in agreement with some speeches that may have suggested that the structures for supervision and for reacting to events in the financial system in the United States are superior to those that we have in Europe. I sincerely believe that the facts do not show this, but rather that there is an argument in favour of the European regulation and supervision structures and the way that the financial markets function in Europe in a whole series of areas compared with what happens in the United States.
Thirdly, the Lamfalussy Level 3 Committees are extraordinarily important. Two of the three Level 3 Committees, the Banking Committee and the Insurance and Occupational Pensions Committee, were only created in 2005, even though the Lamfalussy Process began in 1999. We need to make up for lost time, but a great deal of time was wasted before this Commission came in.
Fourthly, how do we move forward? It appears from some of the speeches that some of you think that it is the Commission’s responsibility to make the decision to move forward at the right pace. I am not going to hide the Commission’s responsibilities, which it does have, as do Parliament and the Council, and of course the Member States.
My experience of taking part in many recent discussions in Ecofin, and also in the Eurogroup, on developments in supervision and regulation and on how to deal with the turbulence in the financial markets and respond to the uncertainty, lack of confidence and failings that we are seeing in the system, my experience, which I can share with you and you can choose to believe it or not, is that the greatest obstacles to moving forward are the positions of some Member States. This is not, however, in Member States that are not suffering the consequences of the financial turbulence.
There is a lot of work being done. I understand why Parliament wants the work to go more quickly, but I think that Parliament has the same information as the Commission and the Council, and therefore knows that a great deal of work is being done in many directions at once. We are in a situation in which improvisation tends to lead to mistakes, and in which trying to do things before we know what needs to be done tends to be counterproductive. There are experiences in Europe and the United States relating to previous supervision problems and previous regulation problems, previous financial problems, that show that it is better to wait for a few months and get it right than speed up the possible response and make the problems that we want to tackle even worse.
One last consideration: the Commission has the right of legislative initiative in the European Union. The Commission is never going to give up its right of initiative, it is never going to hand over this right of initiative to the Lamfalussy Committees. It takes them into account, but it is never going to consider that the Commission’s right of initiative should be handed over to the Lamfalussy Committees, and I do not think Parliament or the Council think so either. What is true, as I have said, is that all of us, starting with the Commission, think that the coordination between the Level 3 Lamfalussy Committees, the capacity to adopt criteria and decisions with a system of majority voting, the capacity to react with almost binding decisions, is something that is increasingly evident and increasingly necessary, in view of the extraordinary importance of the task that these committees have to carry out. However, this should not lead us to confuse them with the holders of the right of legislative initiative in Europe."@en1
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