The EU will on Thursday unveil plans to supercharge its finance industry, tearing up swathes of rules in a bid to take on Wall Street. The package, which is massive in scope and ambition, would amend at least 10 financial laws to crack down on protectionism and unclog the EU’s financial plumbing. But Brussels’ ambitions to create a U.S.-style financial market will reopen political wounds, especially its plan to create a powerful EU watchdog for financial markets. Despite the bloc’s urgent need for private investment, progress could be bogged down by political divisions over the strategy. “If we’re stuck in a never-ending discussion about how to organize supervision … that will not take us closer to our objective,” Swedish Minister for Financial Markets Niklas Wykman said. The Commission’s overarching goal is to remove barriers to investment in the bloc, allowing more money to flow to struggling businesses so the EU can better keep up with economic powerhouses like the U.S. and China. With national budgets under strain from a bruising pandemic and years of inflation, Brussels is hoping to unlock €11 trillion in cash savings held by EU citizens in their bank accounts to breathe life into the economy. It plans to do that by breaking down technical barriers and busting protectionism between the EU’s 27 national money markets, as well as by changing rules that create national barriers to finance flows and by creating a powerful EU watchdog for financial markets. The EU’s finance chief, Maria Luís Albuquerque, who has led work on the revamp, told POLITICO in an interview: “It’s going to be a difficult discussion, of course, but these are the ones worth having, right?” | Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images Some capitals, though, view the proposal as a power grab and are determined to keep oversight of financial markets at the national level. And there are other tweaks in the package that will dredge up painful recent debates over issues like crypto rules or trading data. Countries are already warning that the Commission should keep its nose out of their business. Sweden, the EU’s best-in-class country for financial markets, has warned the EU executive not to interfere with any rules but instead to focus on boosting the appetite of EU citizens to invest in products like stocks and bonds, rather than parking their cash in savings accounts. Supervision is “not the problem and it’s not the solution to the problem,” Wykman told POLITICO. Among other ideas the Commission was mulling ahead of the official publication — according to documents seen by POLITICO — are a stronger EU-wide public ‘ticker tape’ of trading data, an expanded pilot program for decentralized finance to include all products and crypto firms, and a reduction in paperwork to make it easier to sell investment funds across the EU. The plans are sure to please some industry players, like stock exchanges or central securities-depositary groups that operate in multiple EU countries. But they will also inevitably be opposed by others, such as asset managers who are reluctant to be subject to increased EU oversight, or stock exchanges that don’t want to see their pricey trading data services undercut by a stronger public EU ticker tape. The technical shifts, plus the idea of an EU-wide watchdog, are ambitious but are also reminders of how limited the Commission’s powers are compared those deployed by EU countries at the national level. The Commission can’t make game-changing reforms in areas like national pensions, taxation or insolvency law for businesses, all of which are major obstacles to a single money market. Nor will many national governments spend the political capital needed to make domestic reforms for the sake of the EU economy. Nonetheless, the Commission is sticking to its guns. The EU’s finance chief, Maria Luís Albuquerque, who has led work on the revamp, told POLITICO in an interview: “It’s going to be a difficult discussion, of course, but these are the ones worth having, right?”

BRUSSELS — The head of Wall Street’s top watchdog is “absolutely not” concerned about the body’s independence from the White House. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins told POLITICO in an interview that President Donald Trump has the power to oust the head of the body and its commissioners. “It’s clear from the law and Supreme Court rulings that we’re part of the executive branch and the president can fire me and the other commissioners,” he said. “He’s [Trump] the head of the executive branch. So I think that goes without saying.” His comments come amid Trump’s repeated attacks on the head of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, as well as his attempts to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the board. Asked whether he has concerns about the SEC’s independence, Atkins said: “No. Absolutely not.” But, he added: “As far as the SEC goes,” he is “confident we could do our job as we have been doing it now for 90 years.” Atkins declined to provide an opinion on Trump’s attacks on Powell — the president has described the Fed chair as a “moron” and a “numbskull” — saying: “That’s another agency altogether. They can — Jay Powell and the president — work out those sorts of things.” CRYPTO RESERVE Atkins praised Trump for his plans to set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve and digital assets stockpile following a presidential executive order. “The U.S. government has seized a lot of Bitcoin and other things. … I think it’s smart not to dump it on the market, frankly, and so I salute the efforts of the president and the Treasury Secretary [Scott Bessent] and others to address that issue.” The SEC chair has unveiled an ambitious agenda for stablecoin regulation known as “Project Crypto,” which he described as a move away from a “head-in-the-sand” approach from the regulator toward the digital technology. “The SEC needs to embrace change. And if you do the opposite … if you are not embracing it, then it goes offshore,” he said, citing the example of FTX, the crypto exchange which was headquartered in the Bahamas and collapsed in 2022. GREEN STANDARDS Atkins has made his dislike of EU rules for corporate sustainability reporting clear, criticizing them in a speech in Paris earlier this week. He has also threatened to withdraw U.S. recognition of international accounting standards over the inclusion of sustainability in their methodology. Asked whether he disagrees with the European Central Bank’s approach of factoring the risks posed by climate change into their policymaking, Atkins said: “Yes, in a word.” “We’re not here to be environmental police or social police or whatever. That’s not our job. And if others want to do that, then that’s up to them,” he said. Atkins said “it doesn’t matter what I believe” regarding his personal views on climate change, adding that the SEC’s position “long before me” was that climate change does not pose a risk to the orderly functioning of financial markets. “I’m just continuing with that. I agree with that position,” he said. ENFORCEMENT AGENDA Separately, Atkins defended the appointment of Meg Ryan, a judge, to the role of head of the SEC’s enforcement division. Her hire broke with a precedent of appointing someone with long experience in securities law. But Atkins said critics are “people who are ignorant, frankly, of how things work.” “Judges don’t come ready-made with knowledge of the securities world,” he said, adding that Ryan is “eminently qualified to take this position.” Judges “learn it on the job, they apply their experience and their knowledge to the case at hand, and they study up and they’re smart people and that’s their job,” Atkins said.