According to its own statement, the Commission wants to tackle the crisis and at the same time meet long-term challenges such as climate change, globalisation or demographic development.

The Commission uses its now published Communication to introduce a number of initiatives, such as an agenda for new competences and new employment opportunities, a platform to combat poverty, a Communication on youth employment or an initiative for a resource efficient Europe.

However: What looks like a great headline, which deserves to be welcomed, must not necessarily be reflected when the details are worked out. In spite of the financial crisis, the strategic initiative n° 27 “the future of pensions” will probably not positively emphasise the advantages of a pay-as-you-go public pension scheme, but rather concentrate on insurance and investment issues for additional private pension insurances.

Several planned strategic initiatives (n° 1 to n° 8), which are supposed to deal with the current lack of regulation on the financial markets, must also be regarded with a certain degree of scepticism. Although regulations on financial supervision, derivatives and in particular credit default swaps as well as an improvement of the Market Abuse and the Capital Requirements Directive have to be welcomed; in view of the current negotiations on hedge funds, one is quickly brought back to reality: myriads of lobbyists from the financial sector have made sure that the Hedge Funds Directive more or less only provides for the registration of hedge fund dealers. This dossier is always delayed in the European Parliament. How delicate this subject is becomes clear when one realises that the members of the Economics Committee have submitted the record number of about 1,700 amendment proposals.

It will be interesting to see, what the announcements of the Commission “Business as usual” and “It is now a matter of political will” really mean.

Further information: