The basic principle of the free movement of capital goes back to the Treaty of Rome 5 and has enjoyed the same status as the other fundamental freedoms since the Maastricht Treaty. I think it is time that we consider what regulatory and institutional adjustments have become necessary since then so that we can take full advantage of the single capital market. Turning first to the regulatory dimension, let’s stick with our example of the entrepreneur in Osnabrück. If his company wishes to issue a bond in the Netherlands, it will agree with the investor whether the transaction is to be carried out under German or Dutch law. This initially sounds like a relatively simple way to conduct cross-border financial transactions despite divergent national legislation. However, financial transactions are often far more complex than that. There might be an entire chain of financial intermediaries, meaning that it is not clear for the final buyer what his/her legal claims and property rights are. The account holder’s legal position from the moment a security is posted to his/her account varies substantially. In some countries, the account holder has full and undivided ownership. In other countries, he/she has an “inferior” legal position, i.e. he/she holds an indirect interest in a property or just a claim against the account provider. At the turn of this century, a group of financial market experts, led by Alberto Giovannini, developed a number of suggestions as to how greater harmonisation in the EU financial markets could be achieved.
Yves Mersch: Advancing Monetary Union Speech by Mr Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the Euro Exhibition, Osnabrück, 25 January 2015. *  *  *  Ladies and gentlemen, Euro banknotes and coins are not just a means of payment. The bridges and arches on our banknotes are a symbol of European integration. They stand for the fact that there is a lot which connects us within the Monetary Union, and that our once so divided continent has succeeded in overcoming these deep divisions, as the crisis has recently shown. Our common currency also therefore stands for shared values. “Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities” have been some of the accession criteria for membership of the EU since the European Council in Copenhagen in June 1993; “Membership presupposes the candidate’s ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union.” 1 The recently published legal opinion of the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice in the case of Peter Gauweiler and the Die Linke party against the ECB on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme also refers to these constitution-like shared legal values. This “constitutional compact” underlies European integration and includes the German constitutional principle of constitutional identity review – it does not exclude it.