Since the previous mandate, Parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee has emerged as a key player in shaping the regulatory landscape for financial services in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis; proposing a substantial strengthening of the economic governance framework; establishing a banking union; and increasing the democratic accountability within the EMU.
The amount and complexity of the new legislation has, to a large extent, determined our work in this mandate. We must, first and foremost, make sure that the new framework for the financial sector, as well as the new banking union and economic governance rules, are properly implemented.
This requires very close parliamentary scrutiny of what the EU executive branch is doing. That is why our committee decided at the beginning of the mandate to increase the intensity and quality of this scrutiny and to equip ourselves accordingly.
We currently have a wide array of instruments to perform this responsibility, including the monetary dialogue with the ECB; the economic dialogue with the Commission, the Council presidency, the President of the Eurogroup and, under certain circumstances, the finance ministers of member states; the structured dialogue with the members of the Commission; public hearings with the EIB, the Chairs of the SSM, SRM and the European supervisory authorities, Eurostat, EFRAG, IASB, among others.
Furthermore, responding to a political demand to increase the democratic scrutiny of the work of the institutions in programme countries (e.g. Greece), the European Parliament has established the financial assistance working group.
Holding all these bodies and institutions to account is a top priority in a parliamentary democracy. This is particularly important, bearing in mind that the ECON committee is the only parliamentary body that exerts democratic control over the banking union institutions and bodies (SSM, SRM) that have replaced national banking supervisory and resolution authorities.
I must also mention the parliamentary scrutiny of hundreds of delegated acts that the Commission adopts on an ongoing basis. This is a crucial committee activity, since many important aspects of the legislation are further specified in these implementing measures, some of which can have a huge impact on the financial sector.
The ECON committee endorsed my proposal at the beginning of the mandate to commit a part our committee time to this activity. There have been cases where Parliament has been forced to object to important measures (e.g Priips, list of non-cooperative jurisdictions).
On the legislative front, ECON has ensured the improvement and the swift adoption of the Juncker plan (we are currently working on its extension) and continued the completion of the financial services regulatory framework with the adoption of very important shadow banking, benchmarks, money market funds, anti-money laundering legislation and, more recently, the prospectus regulation, the EFRAG financing and the financial support to finance watch and better finance.
On the non-legislative front, the Parliament sent a clear and strong message supporting the establishment of a fiscal capacity for the euro area. We look forward now to the Commission's reaction expected for May 2017.
We were also pleased to see a change in the economic governance policy mix towards a growth-friendly fiscal consolidation that intelligently uses all the flexibility that is embedded within the economic governance rules. The ECON committee also works actively to improve our taxation policies and fighting tax avoidance and tax fraud. We will also work on the new proposal on empowering national competition authorities.
In terms of workload, I have to say that ECON has not really felt any apparent reduction in recent weeks and months in the legislative output of the Commission. I dare say that we are actually going back to the busiest days of the last mandate.
If you look at the joint declaration, a large portion consists of ECON fi les, on which work has already started. We are rather busy with EDIS, EFSI 2.0, the new banking package, the securitisation package, anti-money laundering, CCP recovery and resolution and venture capital.
As for the main challenges and issues facing the committee for the remainder of the current legislature, clearly Brexit and its consequences for financial stability is a matter of concern. We will also have to figure out how a capital markets union will work after the UK has left the EU.
We will have to complete the banking union soon, by adopting and implementing EDIS. This will be accompanied by a series of measures aimed at reducing risks in the banking sector.
We will also have to make sure that the regulatory framework for banking and financial services strikes the appropriate balance between stability and growth. We will also need to strengthen the supervisory convergence.
More generally, I think that revising the institutional architecture of the euro area is unavoidable, as is deepening the EMU ability to handle symmetric and asymmetric shocks, something that could be achieved with a fiscal capacity. ECON is ready to work on this.
Financial services and the euro area economic governance are frequently regarded as niche policy areas. One of our biggest challenges is to make sure that our debates are framed in such a way as to allow the citizens and the voters to understand what is at stake.
I think that we have to a large extent succeeded in presenting to the European citizens the terms of one of the most intense debates of the past 10 years in Europe, namely what is the right policy mix to get out of the crisis. Beyond the simplistic austerity/anti-austerity dilemma, I believe that ECON has substantially contributed to framing and shaping European public opinion in this regard.
I think ECON deserves some credit for the consensus-building efforts towards a more growth-friendly implementation of our fiscal rules and an enhanced coordination of economic policies and structural reforms.