At the microphone of BFM Business, the governor of the Banque de France, François Villeroy de Galhau, called for mobilizing the abundant private savings in Europe to finance the ecological and digital transitions.
Present in Davos for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, the Governor of the Bank of France François Villeroy de Galhau welcomed at the microphone of BFM Business the speech given this Tuesday by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump.
“She said that we, Europeans, will stick to our values, to the rules of law. We simply must be more offensive in the way we defend them. And then she drew up a program for change in Europe, for acceleration of growth and innovation in Europe”, said François Villeroy de Galhau.
He recalled that the “fate” of Europeans “does not depend only on the Americans and the Chinese”. “It is time to activate the levers that we have in Europe” to invest, he said, referring to “a resource that we never talk about: private savings”. Because “private savings are abundant” on the Old Continent, insisted the governor, recalling that each year, “there are 300 billion euros of savings of Europeans who will invest outside Europe, and 'first in the United States.
-“Let’s get this 300 billion back”
Thus, “we do not lack capital, but we lack capital markets and generally financial intermediation which is much stronger in the United States”, further underlined François Villeroy de Galhau. “Let’s recover these 300 billion to meet the investment needs we have in Europe” particularly in “the climate transition and the digital transition. (…) Let’s use our assets,” he said.
This is the whole objective of the Union for Savings and Investment, a project defended by the governors of the EU central banks and which aims to create a true single market for financing. With this union, “the best of what the Americans achieve, that is to say finance in the service of the economy, we can do in Europe”.
