The idea for a CMU was first put forward by the President of the European Commission before the European Parliament in July 2014 (Juncker, 2014), in very ambitious language. Last September the Commission presented an action plan to transform that enlightened vision into reality (EC, 2015). From one document to the other the degree of ambition was apparently scaled down.
As Nicolas Véron (2015) recently noted, the plan “mostly boils down to pruning existing rules and correcting some of [the] EU”s own recent regulatory overreach”. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  But this is supposed to be the normal business of the Commission. Let”s check whether this harsh judgment is well founded. What does CMU mean in substance?