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Banking union needed within months- ECB’s Noyer

PARIS - Euro zone countries need to establish a banking union within the coming months, European Central Bank Governing Council member Christian Noyer said on Wednesday, urging member states to speed up the pace.

Euro zone leaders pledged last month to create a single banking supervisor for the bloc’s banks based around the ECB in a first step towards a European banking union, but some officials had suggested this could take until next year.

“We have got to put a banking union in place very quickly,” Noyer said in an interview with Europe 1 radio, adding that EU governments had asked the European Commission to bring out a proposal in September.

“We at the ECB and at the Bank of France are working on it this summer. It needs to be in place this autumn,” said Noyer, who is also governor of the French central bank.

Some Europe officials have suggested that setting up ECB-led banking supervision by the end of the year would not be possible and that it might not be until the middle of next year before it could be up and running.

Among the details to be worked out are precisely what powers the ECB will be given, whether big or all banks will be covered and how to avoid conflicts of interest.

Once the supervisory body is in place, the euro zone’s ESM rescue fund will be allowed to lend directly to banks, which leaders hope will break any links between troubled banks and sovereign borrowers.

“We’ve got to have collective intervention capacities for all the euro zone banks in order to provide reassurance,” Noyer said.