France and Germany aim to create a "European savings product" to attract private capital for development, French President Emmanuel Macron announced yesterday.

"We have jointly decided to call for the creation of a European savings product," Macron said during a joint press conference in Germany with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He expressed regret that due to insufficient means today, hundreds of billions of euros "leave European soil for investments" in the United States.

The European Union suffers from fragmented capital markets, divided among various member countries.

The Union has been discussing proposals for years to achieve results comparable to the U.S. market. However, these discussions have encountered different interests within the "27" member states.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire had already proposed the idea of a "European savings product" with willing EU states in February.

Less than two weeks before the European elections, Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron discussed yesterday, near Berlin, a Franco-German roadmap to boost the EU's competitiveness against competition from China and the United States.

Specifically, they seek decisive progress on the Capital Markets Union, a "supermarket of financing" that has been in the works within the EU for years. Paris and Berlin have not yet agreed on all the terms of this program.

"To mobilize the necessary investments, we must seriously consider a truly integrated European financial market, structured around a banking union and a capital markets union," the two leaders wrote in a joint article on Monday in the Financial Times, criticizing the fact that "too many companies turn to the other side of the Atlantic to finance their growth."