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Collaboration ‘vital’ to US and EU reform, says Barnier

Wednesday 9 June 2010 - by John Rowland

European Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier travelled to Washington DC last month, his first official trip outside of Europe, in a bid to bolster cooperation between the EU and the US on financial reform.

Speaking during his visit, Mr Barnier said that cooperation on the reform agenda was “vital” and the US and EU would “sink or swim together”.

Discussing progress to date, Mr Barnier spoke about the complexity of creating a coordinated global financial framework but warned that financial markets moved faster than political processes and there was a “risk of simply being too late”.

Mr Barnier continued that there remained a lack of international agreement on important areas such as macro-economic imbalances and said that there was impatience in Europe about slow progress in the US on convergence in accounting standards.

He said that the EU would have proposals in place on all G20 commitments within a year and called for the establishment of a Europe-wide ex-ante resolution fund.


During his visit Mr Barnier also met US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner primarily to discuss cooperation on the G20 agenda.

A joint statement said that the US and EU “should focus pragmatically on achieving broadly equivalent outcomes in the context of their different historical and legal traditions” with both sides working towards a common implementation date for Basel trading book rules in 2011.

The Alternative Investment Fund Management Directive was also on the agenda following US concerns that proposed EU rules would limit US-based fund managers’ access to the European market.


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