PARIS (Reuters) – This week’s European Union summit agreed on the need to accelerate work towards a possible European banking union, said French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
Completion of the banking union, which would mean setting up a controversial common deposit insurance scheme, would sharply reduce the possibility of a major banking crisis in the 19 countries sharing the euro and in this way boost market confidence in the euro and demand for the currency.
But the issue is highly sensitive in several euro zone countries and euro zone finance ministers together with their non-euro colleagues from other EU countries have been stuck trying to agree on the deposit guarantee scheme for years.
(Reporting by Michel Rose; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta)
