Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-08-Speech-3-033"
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"en.20081008.14.3-033"2
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"Mr President, I would say to the President-in-Office: At next week’s European Council you must move forward discussions on the Lisbon Treaty. You must be constructive, yet be considerate to the countries which have yet to ratify. You must adopt the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum – though we must still search for schemes to seek skilled newcomers and manage migration – and you should discuss progress in combating climate change.
But no one can mistake the most pressing issue facing this Council. A storm is battering global finance markets, and its effects are being felt across Europe – in jobs lost, pensions eroded and savings under threat. Our citizens are worried. The challenges we face may be the gravest for generations, and they are evolving at lightning speed. It is at moments like this that our Union is defined. We need a collective response. We cannot sustain a situation in which Member States surprise one another through unilateral decisions with multilateral implications. Europe needs coordinated and consistent policies to stem the flow of financial losses, to establish transparency and good practice and to prevent future woes.
There are some who think they can now tap-dance on the grave of capitalism; but solutions will not be found in closed markets and command economies. They only ever short-changed Europe’s citizens. If you build your house there, Martin Schulz, it will be a house built of straw. What we are witnessing is not the failure of the market economy. Rather it is the excesses of unfettered, ineffectively regulated markets. Financial markets currently owe less to Adam Smith than to the Cincinnati Kid. The greed of individual bankers, traders and short-sellers is certainly to blame, but so too is the failure of governments to ensure transparency and honesty in their dealings.
Liberal Democrats have long warned of the dangers which caught the Council unaware and the Commission wrong-footed. Last May my friend Otto Graf Lambsdorff, together with Jacques Delors and others, signed a letter to the Slovenian presidency of the Council. It highlighted the profound danger of economic collapse posed by recent banking practices. In that letter they wrote, ‘Decent capitalism needs effective public policy. Profit-seeking is the essence of a market economy, but when everything is for sale, social cohesion melts and the system breaks down.’ Europe was slow to heed such worries. It must now do what it can to put that system back to business.
Liberals and Democrats hope that the conclusions of the Ecofin Council will form the basis for agreement at the European Council. They are not an overnight cure, but they will help to remedy the underlying sickness. It is right to raise deposit guarantee protection to a EUR 50 000 minimum across the Union. Family savings will be secure and capital flight discouraged. We also look forward to hearing the Commission’s proposal to promote convergence of deposit guarantee schemes, just as we support rapid adoption of your ideas for improving capital adequacy. When you look at credit rating agencies, look at who pays their fees and at how they are supervised.
But we also need to strengthen the links between national financial regulators. Representatives from the euro-zone central banks sit together in the Governing Council of the ECB. Similarly, we need a pan-European financial services authority to maintain order and transparency between financial institutions. The European Council should ask whether the European Union budget might be used to allow the European Investment Bank and the EIF to give credit guarantees for small businesses. They, after all, provide the jobs on which Europeans rely. It is those people who now need speedy and specific action, who need all parties and all Member States to work as one, who expect common solutions to a common challenge."@en1
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