Made for Germany: Tailoring Capital Markets for Growth, Innovation and Prosperity

Stephan Leithner commented on this as follows:

“Made for Germany: Let's tailor our capital markets for growth!

A core message united us at our meeting at the Federal Chancellery today with Friedrich Merz, Lars Klingbeil and Katherina Reiche many leading German companies and investors: Germany’s economy needs a jumpstart. And when politics and industry work together, true progress is possible. That’s why we are supporting "Made For Germany" – an alliance for a strong, successful and sustainable Germany, for us and future generations.

We are seeing a long-overdue awareness of how important capital markets are for growth and prosperity. Now, we need to push ahead with further, more radical measures. Domestic reforms complement and boost the European project of a strong Savings and Investments Union in Europe – to which the German government is also fully committed.

At Deutsche Börse Group, we stand for strong, innovative and reliable capital markets - key to driving innovation, growth, and prosperity. As multipliers, financial markets amplify the important governmental stimulus efforts already contained in the coalition agreement of the German government. At our meeting, I presented some key priorities of our working group to enable capital markets to fully leverage their strengths:

• Unlocking private capital: A modernized pension system with capital market integration is key to mobilizing private capital and securing pensions. It’s great to see the first building blocks of a capital-funded pension system. It would be desirable to extend the ‘Frühstartrente’ to newborns, coupled with simple, capital-based, and low-cost retirement savings accounts. In addition, we must expand employee stock ownership plans to give employees a stake in the economic success of their companies.
• Fueling growth companies: reducing regulatory hurdles and fast-tracking the €10bn SME fund planned in the coalition agreement jointly with the credit sector is key to boost growth.
• Fostering growth financing: the WIN initiative is key for boosting innovation and expansion, e.g., by increasing WIN investments through public capital pooling institutions like KENFO.
• Activating existing capital pools: Strengthening the securitization market and simplifying the investment regulation for institutional investors is key to deepen liquidity. We need to win more national and international investors!

Let's build a stronger economic future for Germany and Europe together!”