A Benelux Bourse? Building a Real Savings and Investments Union from the Bottom Up

This event will be livestreamed here and on YouTube.

A Single European Capital Market has been a goal of the European Integration process since the 1960s. The current proposals for a Savings and Investment Union (SIU) reflect a Europe where capital is significantly underutilised, where relatively few citizens invest in the financial markets and where many European companies struggle to access private market funding. This is despite very high savings rates and a high level of household wealth.

Building on a proposal by the Flemish Christian Democrats (CD&V) we ask if closer Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) cooperation on financial markets could serve as a catalyst for wider integration? What would such integration look like in practice? Would this enable a more productive utilisation of the hundreds of billions of euros held in Benelux savings accounts (270 million euros in Belgium alone)?

This event will discuss if this bottom up/regional approach to SIU offers a means to jump-start the SIU process. It will also consider how to bring about the real cultural change required for such proposals to succeed.