European finance ministers made an attempt to work out a plan for a single system of bank supervision, but chances of a breakthrough appeared slim.
The creation of a single supervisor is important to Europe's strategy to break the vicious circle between the debt problems of banks and governments, but an initial surge of enthusiasm for the idea has quickly run into legal and practical difficulties. Most of the difficulties are tied to balancing the interests of countries inside and outside Europe's currency union, but even within the eurozone the differences of opinion are big enough to make it unlikely that the region will meet its self-imposed deadline of January 1, 2013, for setting up the new supervisor.
"It's quite clear we still have a very long road to travel before we have a solution to this question", said Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg, possibly the most outspoken representative of the ten EU states who aren't in the eurozone, and who fear being marginalised and undermined if, as the European Commission proposes, a new board at the European Central Bank assumes ultimate responsibility for supervising banks across the EU.
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