Politics & Power Quote by John Bruton

Regulation is framed here less as a brake than as the missing piece of infrastructure for a modern economy. Bruton’s intent is pragmatic: reassure business and voters that oversight isn’t moral scolding, it’s economic maintenance. The key move is the conditional threat: if regulation “fails to keep up,” it won’t merely allow risk, it will “hold back economic expansion.” That flips the usual pro-market storyline. The danger isn’t too much regulation; it’s obsolete regulation that creates uncertainty, mispricing, and uneven competition.

The subtext is distinctly post-crisis European: financial innovation and cross-border capital flows have outgrown the jurisdictional patchwork designed for slower, national markets. “Keep up” is doing a lot of work. It implies an arms race between regulators and financial engineering, and it hints at embarrassment - policymakers perpetually arriving after the damage is done. Bruton also signals to two audiences at once: to skeptics of oversight, he argues regulation is pro-growth; to those wary of markets, he implies that smart rules can domesticate volatility without strangling dynamism.

The line about “national and European level” is the political tell. It’s an argument for coordinated sovereignty: rules strong enough to prevent regulatory arbitrage (firms shopping for the weakest regime) and consistent enough to support a single market. In that sense, the quote is a pitch for legitimacy as much as for policy: if Europe wants integrated finance, it needs integrated guardrails - not as an ideological project, but as the price of expansion.