Europe needs to swiftly complete its planned banking union to prevent future crisis, experts say.<br /><br />But Finance Watch, which relieves 45 percent of its funding from the EU, says big lenders must be broken up first.<br /><br />Thierry Philipponat, the group’s secretary-general, said: “The main problem in Europe is that we have banks that are too large, too complex too interconnected to make any system and I insist any system of protecting tax payers against banks failures from succeeding.”<br /><br />They say investment banks should be hived off from their retail counterparts, Philipponat said.<br /><br />It was an idea first floated in a European Commission-backed report last year.<br /><br />Adrian Blundell-Wignall, a financial markets expert at the OECD, said prevention is better than cure. <br /><br />“If you let the problem come you can have a very good single market, a Single Resolution Authority and the rest of it even a big enough fund to carry that up,” he said.<br /><br />“It’s after that you’ve got the problem and it is still going to cost money. So the key thing is to stop getting to that point.”<br /><br />The economists were meeting at a forum in Brussels organised by Finance Watch.<br /><br />They voiced concern that banks have been bailed out, this money is not being lent to homes and businesses.<br /><br />Only 28% of the 46-trillion-euro European banking sector has been lent to households and firms in 2012, according to Finance Watch.
