News

Testimony to the European Parliament Budget Committee on EU borrowing costs

Publishing date: 22 May 2023
Authors: Rebecca Christie

Rebecca Christie spoke on May 22, 2023 to the European Parliament’s Budget Committee to lead off the second panel of a workshop on European Union borrowing costs, recommending that the EU adopt a permanent public debt as a form of public infrastructure; that the EU manage borrowing costs outside the discretionary budget framework; and that EU debt managers be given the tools to operate in the same space as highly rated sovereign borrowers.

In the first part of the workshop, Bruegel colleagues Gregory Claeys, Conor McCaffrey and Lennard Welslau discussed their research on the rising costs of EU-issued debt and recommended that the EU learn to live with interest rate cyclicality, as sovereign borrowers do, rather than try to time the market. The EU can narrow its spreads by reviewing how it accounts for these costs.

The full recap the workshop can be found here.

The full recording of the workshop is here, with Ms Christie’s remarks appearing between 17:23-17:33.

The Claeys-McCaffrey-Welslau report on EU borrowing costs is here.

You can download a full copy of Ms Christie's remarks below.

Rebecca Christie testimony to the EP BUDG Committee

About the authors

Rebecca Christie

Rebecca Christie is a Senior fellow at Bruegel and hosts Bruegel's podcast, The Sound of Economics. She is also the Brussels columnist for Reuters Breakingviews. She writes about the crossroads of markets, policy and politics, particularly where it comes to the European Union and how it interacts with the world. She was lead author on the European Stability Mechanism’s official history book, "Safeguarding the Euro in Times of Crisis: the Inside Story of the ESM".

Over more than two decades in journalism, Rebecca has reported from Brussels, Washington and around the world for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones Newswires/The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. She joined Bruegel as a visiting fellow in 2019.

She has also served as an expert adviser to a European Economic and Social Committee panel on taxation, is a regular conference speaker and moderator, and has provided editing and policy analysis to the European Commission, members of the European Parliament, and the African Development Bank. A US-Belgian dual citizen, she holds degrees from Duke University and from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.