{"id":6871,"date":"2026-06-17T21:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T21:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/?post_type=blog&p=6871"},"modified":"2026-06-17T21:45:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T21:45:18","slug":"day-zero-verdict-europe-has-the-capital-but-lacks-the-machinery","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/blog\/day-zero-verdict-europe-has-the-capital-but-lacks-the-machinery\/","title":{"rendered":"Day Zero \u201cVerdict\u201d: Europe Has The Capital, But Lacks The Machinery"},"content":{"rendered":"

FII PRIORITY Europe opened on the terrace of the Rome Cavalieri, with Matteo Renzi reminding the room that the European project itself was born a few kilometres away, when six countries signed the Treaties of Rome almost seventy years ago. Europe, he told the room, had a choice to make: keep watching from the sidelines, or finally act like the protagonist that its history and economy entitle it to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The question on the table was blunt: after a year of shocks, from Liberation Day to the war in the Middle East and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and with Mario Draghi\u2019s new book Compete or Perish published that same morning, is Europe still pressing snooze on its own alarm clock?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Broken assumptions as an opportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scott Geary, Vice Chair and Head of Global Wealth at Wellington Management, answered with a diagnosis rather than a defence. Europe\u2019s old growth model, he argued, rested on three assumptions that have all quietly failed: cheap exports to both China and the US, cheap energy from Russia, and an American security umbrella Europe no longer plans to lean on indefinitely. The collapse of each of those pillars, he said, is precisely why Wellington is interested in investing in Europe now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A trillion-dollar gap<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Franck Petitgas, Vice Chairman of Europe at Blackstone, put a number on what comes next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Draghi report says you need a trillion dollars a year, virtually just in private capital, in addition to public capital, for reinvestment in infrastructure, data, defence and energy,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s fashionable to be bearish about Europe,\u201d he added, before making the opposite case: a \u20ac25 trillion economy, valuations a quarter below those in the US, and debt-to-GDP ratios lower than either America\u2019s or China\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is the capacity to harness the savings, to lever up further, and to deploy that capital,\u201d he said – capital that Europe, alone among major economies, holds in surplus, even as it runs a parallel shortage, with trillions sitting in low-yield bank deposits while reindustrialization waits for funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bureaucracy\u2019s bill<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sir Conor Burns, a former UK trade policy minister, made the case against bureaucracy with a story rather than a statistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was being reminded by somebody at Dubai Port. They were trying to get permission for an access road in London, and the process was taking an eternity. He said: Well, here in Dubai, they do not require us to build tunnels for the hedgehogs. We are drowning in bureaucracy across all the governments of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His deeper worry was not capital, he said, but talent: British and European founders are increasingly showing up in Dallas and New York to raise money, not because Europe has lost its inventiveness, but because it is not backing them once they have proved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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3% growth, 8% ambition gap – Finland\u2019s case<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jarno Syrj\u00e4l\u00e4, Finland\u2019s Under-Secretary of State for International Trade, turned the question on his own country. Finnish large-cap firms grew roughly 3% a year over the past decade, against 8% for global peers – a gap that traces back to an ambition level set too low, and a national instinct to avoid risk rather than chase scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A shock without a recession<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The numbers that closed the session made the case for hope on their own: more than 100 days of closure at the Strait of Hormuz, which the International Energy Agency has called the worst energy shock on record, and yet the European Central Bank still expects 0.8% growth this year and 1.2% next, with no stagflation because there is no stagnation. Geary called it a shift from an efficiency-led model to a resilience-led one. Petitgas\u2019s read was simpler still: for now, this looks hopeful for Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Minerals, money and agri-tech<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four conclaves ran alongside the main stage on Day Zero, and each arrived at some version of the same argument: Europe\u2019s constraint is not a lack of ideas, but rather the machinery to turn them into scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On critical minerals, the conversation centered on a supply chain exposed to real risk: geopolitical tension has made the sector volatile for investors, and traceability remains limited. Several participants pointed to the need for governments to work in a more coordinated way. The conversation also flagged a policy gap on recycling rare minerals already in circulation, and a shrinking pool of skilled workers entering the industry. Underneath it all was one imbalance: AI infrastructure is pulling in enormous capital, while the rare earths and minerals that physically build that infrastructure are not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Momentum Italia reached a version of the same diagnosis from a different angle: Europe\u2019s problem is not ideas, but pipes. The continent produces a disproportionate share of the world\u2019s most-cited research, yet deep-tech venture investment runs at roughly a tenth of US levels, while the productivity gap with the US is approaching 70% and still widening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The agri-tech conclave made the capital-deployment argument with food instead of finance. South America, anchored by Minerva Foods, was framed as the world\u2019s \u201cglobal farm\u201d, already accounting for 40% of global beef exports, built on a circular model where corn becomes ethanol, ethanol by-products feed cattle, and cattle tallow becomes sustainable aviation fuel. Brazil\u2019s edge, participants argued, came precisely from the absence of the subsidies that cushion European and American farmers: forced to innovate without a safety net, it built a precision-agriculture and genetic-engineering ecosystem instead. It is the same lesson Rome kept circling back to all evening: scarcity, not comfort, tends to produce scale.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FII PRIORITY Europe opened on the terrace of the Rome Cavalieri, with Matteo Renzi reminding the room that the European project itself was born a few kilometres away, when six countries signed the Treaties of Rome almost seventy years ago. Europe, he told the room, had a choice to make: keep watching from the sidelines, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6873,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[761],"tags":[771,411],"class_list":["post-6871","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-day-0-fii-priority-europe-2026-summit","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/6871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/blog"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/6871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fii-institute.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}