BRUSSELS, 9th April, 2024 (WAM) -- The European Union’s economy chief said the bloc should create a central treasury that can finance common goods through the issuance of eurobonds, as the EU confronts massive spending demands to bolster its defense sector, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
“I have no doubt that the EU would benefit hugely from a permanent safe asset commensurate with the size of its economy,” Paolo Gentiloni, the European Commissioner for Economy, told a conference in Brussels on Tuesday. “I am equally convinced that our end goal should be the establishment of an EU-wide central fiscal capacity.”
Gentiloni said that institutions including the International Monetary Fund, the OECD and the European Central Bank have backed these ideas in the past. The European Commission, the EU executive’s arm, declined to include these proposals when the EU was discussing the reform of the fiscal rules, given the difficulty of the debate, Gentiloni said.
“But the time to start this discussion is now,” he said.