The new proposals of the European Commission intend to avoid future bank bail-outs, according to the announcement of the Commission's President. In particular, the Commission proposes within a framework for resolution, prevention, early supervisory intervention and resolution powers and tools.

The European Commission presented new measures in order to ensure that, in the future, authorities will have the means to intervene decisively both before problems occur and early on in the process to avoid bank bail-outs. In addition, if the financial situation of a bank deteriorates beyond repair, the proposal ensures that a bank's critical functions can be rescued while the costs of restructuring and resolving failing banks fall upon the bank's owners and creditors and not on taxpayers. In 2010, the Commission already proposed a bank tax to cover the costs of winding down banks that go bust.

The framework of these proposals builds on recent efforts by several Member States to improve national resolution systems. The proposed tools are divided into powers of "prevention", "early intervention" and "resolution", with intervention by the authorities becoming more intrusive as the situation deteriorates.

With theses proposals, the EU is fully delivering on its G20 commitments, according to José Manual Barroso, President of the Commission. The crisis clearly demonstrated that when problems hit one bank, they can spread to the whole financial sector and well beyond the borders of any one country. The financial crisis provided clear evidence of the need for more robust crisis management arrangements at national level, as well as the need to put in place arrangements better able to cater for cross-border banking failures. During the past years, governments have had to inject public money into banks and issue guarantees on an unprecedented scale. For this reason, the Commission presented the new crisis management measures to avoid future bank bail-outs.