Banking Union Moves Ahead With Bail-Out Fund Rules and Chairman Pick

The European Union has taken important steps in recent days regarding the bloc-wide banking union, finalizing how much banks will have to chip in to the bail-out fund and tapping a German regulator to oversee the fund.

This week the Council of the European Union announced it had reached a political agreement on rules regarding how much banks will pay to the Single Resolution Fund. The fund is a key piece of the EU’s banking union, which was designed to provide tighter oversight of the sector’s biggest banks and avoid taxpayer-funded bailouts that marked the 2008 financial collapse. Reaching an agreement on how to fund the bail-out pot was no easy feat, as member states bristled against the possibility of footing the bill for bank collapses in other member states. The agreement will be adopted without further debate once the text is finalized in all languages,...