Profits without investment Financialisation and Europe's investment gap 03 August 2026 Across Europe, policymakers are turning to de-risking to finance the continent’s growing investment gap, which Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on European competitiveness identified to be around 800 billion. Derisking involves the public sector using government policy and funding, for instance through guarantees or regulation, to adjust the risks and returns of private investors to channel private finance into desirable areas. This approach is now embedded across EU and member state policy, including InvestEU, the proposed Competitiveness Fund, Germany’s Deutschlandfonds, and France’s France 2030 programme. Yet this approach is fundamtenally mismatched to the problem. Take Shell for example. In 2023, the fossil fuel giant secured a €150m subsidy for its Holland Hydrogen I project. However, reporting by Follow the Money revealed that Shell was ineligible for the subsidy and only received it by exerting pressure on the Dutch government. Far from needing public support, the company was facing windfall profits from soaring fossil gas prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Shell channelled these profits to shareholders, distributing an extraordinary 97% of net gains in 2023. At the same time, the company successfully overturned a landmark ruling that had required it to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030. The example of Shell is not an exception. Over the last two decades the financial reserves held by corporations have grown, shareholder distributions have increased. At the same time investment into new productive capacity has fallen. The constraint is not the availability of capital. It is the governance regime that determines what firms do with it. Without confronting this directly, through conditionality, capital discipline and a serious conversation about the accumulated financial reserves sitting on corporate balance sheets and paid out to shareholders, Europe will not be...