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First of all, we have to consider the fact that we can't just have public money. I start with the most complicated area because we have always had public money in Europe. But we need to leverage private funding. We had the Juncker plan from 2015 to 2020, which was a good idea in my view. But now, we have to think about winning the battle by mobilizing private capital.

That is not happening in Europe. We can convince the creditor countries in Europe to mobilize some public funding, but they will only do so if we can mobilize private capital. Some European countries are against public funding altogether because of the differences in public debt. The savings and investments union is a step in the right direction here as it tries to integrate the financial markets, giving European savers more opportunities and offering the prospect of attractive returns. We have to build up fiscal incentives, of course.

And then we need to create a bridge to allow those savings to be invested in European public goods. At the end of 2026, the NextGenerationEU funds will come to an end. So what’s next? If nothing happens, we’ll be back to the budget of the pre-COVID period. That will fall far short of the level of needs and expectations that we currently have. So the only way to get things working is to have two pillars: public and private capital. I think that the savings and investments union is part of this, and I hope that member states will buy this idea. The Commission has voted, and now it’s time for the member states to do so.

I think it’s very simple. If we don't, they will be obliged to come back to the pre-COVID budget and cut all European expenditures. And it is not easy to address Europe’s new needs by saying, “Hey, people, sorry: we have to cut Erasmus. We’ve got to have Horizon, so we’ve cut structural funds and funds for rural areas.”

I don't see any prime minister going to their people and saying, “Sorry, we’ve decided to cut.” At the same time, this is the only way to finance some of these missions. Otherwise, member states will have to open their wallets with only national contributions to public European funds. That will be a big struggle, and it won't happen, in my view.

The big push will come from outside. Today, that’s Donald Trump.

The pressures from the US are creating some miracles at the European level.

In reality, I think fiscal legislation gave a lot of incentives to capital in many EU countries. But we’ve been in a situation in which the markets didn't take these incentives. And the European fiscal pressure on labor is still very high. So my point is that fiscal incentives on capital have to become something that can attract ordinary savers. This is the key point: not Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, but middle-class savers. They have to feel the incentives are good for them – a way to complement what they earn. That is not what has been happening in Europe. So I strongly believe that we can try to reorient these fiscal incentives to middle-class savers. And that needs scale. We need fiscal incentives at the European level with an agreement from the different countries. It hasn’t happened yet, but it can happen, and that is the main theme in my report and of the savings and investment union.

Yes, you are right. But we have had examples where very focused incentives worked to transform savings in energy for the real economy. In Italy, we have had the Piani Individuali di Risparmio (PIR: individual savings plans), which have worked well. And there are many other examples.

So my proposal is to create this at the European level: a saving plan, pushing savers middle-class savers – to trust this European tool and to obtain good returns at the same time as helping the European economy. There's a problem of culture, yes. There's the problem of financial trust, yes. At the same time, we are now 12 years on from the financial crisis. Our European financial system is strong and is showing resilience in the face of Trump's aggressions.

So I think we are mature enough to do this now.

We have a reform of the Stability and Growth Pact underway. We have to check that it is working properly, and we can be flexible in adjusting it. But what Ursula von der Leyen said and did on the defense plan demonstrates that there is enough flexibility. So I don't think that the problem is a too-rigid interpretation of the pact. The problem is a lack of investment. And this lack of investment is because of fragmentation and the lack of a strong private capital market. And we have to work on these two issues.

The single market was created in the 1980s around the four freedoms: freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and people. And these four freedoms are the mirror of the economy of that time, without the intangible fifth freedom – research, innovation, knowledge and education – which makes economies successful today. So my proposal in the report is to create the fifth freedom to boost productivity and competitiveness.

That means a big effort in terms of the way in which we invest in R&D. The US has had fantastic performance in recent years because it was able to increase its private investments in R&D by four times in 12 years with the same flat investment of public money.

This is the example that we have to follow.

We need private capital for R&D,

through the savings and investments union, and we also need to organize our university and research system in a different way.

For instance, one topic that I discuss in my report is that we don’t have a European degree. The mutual recognition of the different degrees issued by different countries and universities is a nightmare for institutions, people and students.

We could apply the idea of the 28th virtual state to that too – to unify and simplify it. And we can also work on some of the ideas we’ve had in the past. One of those was the European universities alliances. In 2017, we created the European universities alliances – groups of seven, eight or nine universities from different countries. I remember it because I was working in Paris at Sciences Po at the time. We created Civica, which is one of the 65 university alliances. My current university, IE, is part of that one.

These alliances are great because they are the embryos of scale at the university level. Our universities are too small compared to what is happening in the US, China and India. We need to have bigger universities, and these alliances can be the embryos of that, but we need money too. So we come back to the idea that if the next EU budget is back at pre-COVID levels, there will be no money for this. And with all the needs we have at the moment, that would be a huge step back.

I think the integration of financial markets is the number one. When I say that, I immediately see the difficulty because it is not the most popular topic. We need the commitment of our prime ministers, of our leaders, of the president of the European Commission and of the president of the European Council. We need legitimacy and ownership. We want to say to Europe’s citizens, “Hey guys, we are a colony of the US today in the financial markets. If we want to be resilient, we need to integrate our financial market under European supervision with European tools.”

And that has to involve getting rid of the national passport. The problem is not only technical but also political.

If each European financial protagonist or bank starts with a national passport, that’s immediately a way for them to be stopped at the border

– the border that doesn't exist anymore yet does exist for these kinds of initiatives.

If an Italian or Spanish or Swedish bank tries to overcome its own national market to play in Europe, immediately the passport becomes a minus, not a plus. That’s not the case in the US, where each financial-market protagonist is American, not from Texas or from California. And so that company can take advantage of the biggest market without any problems.

Europe is different, where, if you start out French, moving beyond the French border is a problem. It's complicated.

Maybe it is a shortcut answer, but I'm convinced that the true killer of the capital markets union was Brexit.

The reason I say that is because the capital markets union was created in 2014. This was a very good project, and it was a project that could succeed with the idea of having one capital for Europe’s financial markets. And the capital was to be London. It was absolutely the right place, and it would have been a great success. Today, we would have the capital markets union done and London as the capital of our financial market. We would all be stronger.

But Brexit killed this idea, and then we spent years on a struggle over which capital would take the lead: Dublin, Milan, Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris or Frankfurt. There's no London 2.0 in Continental Europe.

I think that now we have to start from zero, beginning with this idea of the savings and investments union. And we have to try to reduce the importance of place. We might not need a capital because of today’s technology. So we could have a system of unique supervision and use this to make the 27 authorities work together. That could work. I know it won’t be easy, but I see the potential today.

I think it is the only direction we can take. And the example of Airbus is very interesting because, ultimately, Airbus was created not by the markets but by the politicians – out of the need to join this particular kind of industry.

And it is not by chance that Airbus is maybe the only world champion that we have in Europe. Airbus is European – nobody can say it is from one country or another. But you can't say the same for all the brands we have in the financial markets.

Tell me one brand, and I will give you the name on the passport.

And the name on the passport will be the limit, the ceiling of this brand. That is the key point. We have to change this mentality. I see the difficulties, but, ultimately, this is the only way. The savings and investments union is a means of moving in that direction.

I think the main lesson is that when you are in trouble, you have to go big – and we didn't. I remember the first few years of the crisis. We were still thinking that it was just a problem of the financial world. I still remember the mood in 2008, 2009 even 2010 – that it was a problem of the financial world, not a problem touching the real economy.

In reality, the financial world was the first stage, but then the wave came over the real economy and then into the social sphere, where it led to populism. European populism is, ultimately, the outcome of this crisis – and of the perception that European institutions and the euro were not able to act as a shield. The lack of a shield wasn’t because of European institutions, but because of countries that didn’t want to integrate further into the EU.

We live in this paradox. You hear easy populistic shortcuts saying that we are weak – that we had the euro and started becoming less relevant in the world. This is totally stupid: we became less relevant because China and India entered the world, and then the other BRICS.

And then the world changed from 3 billion to 8 billion people, and we Europeans are still the same; that is the big difference. We were big countries, and now we are small countries. And if we are small countries, we have to integrate into a European system that allows us to compete with China, India and the US. It is simple, but the consequences make life very difficult.

I think it is exactly the opposite. One idea behind the savings and investments union is addressing inequalities. One of the main inequalities that we have in Europe today is the fact that financially educated people are able to get a lot of money. People who aren’t financially educated can’t get money through finance. And this is a hidden inequality hurdle. The main goal of the savings and investments union is to provide middle-class savers with better opportunities. So I don't think that greater inequality is a risk.

The main unintended consequence I am afraid of is a sort of decoupling with the US.

That is, in my view, the worst-case scenario. I wrote and finalized my report before Trump's election. I included a reference to the need to create a transatlantic single market, or at least to start discussing its creation. I am strongly in favor of a good relationship between the two sides.

I will give you three examples of things that I hope will be reality in 2040. Now, you may tell me that these things are not so complicated and that they are absolutely natural, but in reality they are very complicated. The first is to have just one indicator for telephone numbers in Europe: +0, as +1 is taken by the US. So we would be done with +49, +39 and +34. That means having a single market for telecoms and being able to choose between six, ten or twelve European operators. Those could be strong enough to be world champions, not as we are today. At the moment, each European country has its own national champion, but the national champion is too small to compete at world level. The consumers would be happy, and we could retake the leadership in a field where we were leaders in the 1980s and 1990s.

My second example is energy: a world in which you – as a consumer or as an SME – can choose to take energy from a different European energy source every day with a connectivity system that works perfectly. Tomorrow, you’ll have the wind from the north at a low cost, and the day after, you will take solar from the south, and on the third day, you’ll have nuclear from France because the connectivity will work so well that you can choose every morning to connect to whichever’s the lowest cost.

And the third one is to have the digital euro available for all payments in Europe, among European consumers, on European ground, on European goods.

I think these three are very simple examples in daily life. Of course, behind them, you need revolutions in the three systems I mentioned: telecoms, energy and financial service. But they are possible, and they will mean that Europe is stronger, more integrated and able to offer our citizens better lifestyles, better earnings, and better services.