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President of US manufacturer argues small modular reactors can solve energy transition challenges

The world cannot meet climate targets and ensure reliable power supplies without the rapid deployment of nuclear energy, according to the president of Holtec International, a US company developing small modular reactors (SMRs) and reopening a large-scale nuclear plant in Michigan.

Kelly Trice says nuclear energy will be “indispensable” if countries are to meet the Paris Accord — the international treaty on climate change — because it provides the type of round-the-clock power needed to stabilise national grids at a time when electricity demand is surging.

He adds that intermittent power sources such as wind and solar on their own cannot meet the demands of artificial intelligence data centres and electric cars without the backup of nuclear, which is carbon-free and provides so-called baseload power — the minimum amount needed to meet demand at all times.

“Spain had the two-day blackout. A lot of people ascribe that to the over reliance on wind and solar, as well as the instability of the grid, as a result of the ups and downs of that kind of [renewable] power,” Trice says. “The demand for power is insatiable and the result is, you don’t have a choice. Nuclear is a very viable, strong component and is indispensable, as baseload power stabilises the grid.”

Trice says SMRs, new types of reactors with a typical power capacity of 300MW or less, would help solve some of the difficult transition challenges facing governments and industry. Extending the lifespan of existing reactors and restarting mothballed ones could also help to meet surging demand, he says.

Until recently, demand for nuclear energy in western countries had flatlined because of safety concerns following the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011, the growth in renewable energy and the rollout of natural gas power plants. But a surge in power demand from data centres, reshoring of manufacturing and electrification of transport — which is forecast to increase electricity demand in the US by 50 per cent by 2050 — and Big Tech’s commitment to cut emissions, are fuelling a nuclear investment boom. 

Energy security, which moved centre stage following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and technology advances have also helped to rejuvenate a sector that investors had previously shunned because of delays and cost overruns on mega projects. As the US and China compete aggressively to dominate AI technologies, presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are providing industry with tens of billions of dollars in government support to build additional capacity.

In September, Holtec was awarded a $1.5bn federal loan to help fund the restart of the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which was mothballed in 2022. If it is successful, it will mark the first time a nuclear power plant in the US has been restarted after being shut down for decommissioning.

“We are on schedule and under budget,” says Trice, adding that the Palisades plant should reopen in the fourth quarter of 2025 following repairs to equipment, safety checks and regulatory approval. 

He says reopening existing nuclear plants and extending their lifespan is much cheaper than building new facilities, and that Palisades has a total budgeted cost of $2.2bn. The project should come in under budget by several hundred million dollars, says Trice, adding that Holtec plans to place two SMRs at Palisades, which should almost double its 800MW capacity.

Holtec is one of dozens of companies developing more than 80 different SMR designs globally. As these reactors are modular, it means most of their components can be built in factories and assembled on site. So far China and Russia have built a handful of SMRs and the first western designs are expected to be deployed by 2030.

Nuclear advocates expect the smaller scale and more advanced technology in SMRs to reduce the risk of budget overruns and delays, which have blighted large-scale nuclear projects in recent years.  

The last two large-scale nuclear reactors built in the US, at the Vogtle power plant in Georgia, were completed seven years late and $17bn over budget. In Britain, EDF’s Hinkley Point nuclear power plant project is forecast to cost £46bn, up from an initial estimate of £18bn.

Holtec’s SMR-300 design is a pressurised light-water reactor that will produce at least 300MW of electric power on a small parcel of land. Unlike most traditional nuclear power plants that require large quantities of water, the SMR-300 can be adjusted to use an air-cooling system to produce reliable heat and power in arid environments.

The company plans to start construction of its first SMRs at its plant in Camden, New Jersey, later this year, says Trice, adding that it has plans to build fleets of SMRs in the US, Europe and Asia.

Holtec, which is a private company that specialises in nuclear fuel storage, transport and decommissioning, still faces a significant financing challenge to realise its ambition of deploying a global fleet of SMRs. Trice says the company is in advanced negotiations with International Holdings Company, an Abu Dhabi-based investment fund, over a potential $10bn fundraising.  

“The deal is in serious negotiations. We intend to do it and I believe we will consummate the deal before the year is out,” Trice says.

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Welsh biotech wins funding to develop new depression treatments

$140mn financing will allow Draig Therapeutics to move drug candidates into clinical trials

A biotech company founded in Wales last year has raised $140mn in its first financing round to develop drugs for severe depression and other brain disorders that have few safe and effective treatment options.

Draig Therapeutics, named from the Welsh word for dragon, was formed by a partnership between Cardiff University’s Medicines Discovery Institute and venture capital firm SV Health Investors. Five other investment funds joined the oversubscribed Series A round.

The funding will enable Draig to move its lead drug candidate DT-101 into the second phase of clinical testing for major depressive disorder this year. The compound, which is a small molecule taken orally, has already completed Phase 1 safety testing in 60 volunteers. Two more Draig drug candidates are due to move into clinical studies in 2026.

“It is incredibly unusual to have scientists in academia building up a clinical stage pipeline of such high quality,” said Kate Bingham, SV Health managing partner. It is notable too that Draig comes from outside the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London where most biotech start-ups are located, she added.

Ruth McKernan, neuroscientist and biotech entrepreneur, is Draig’s co-founder and executive chair. She said the company’s approach was to correct the imbalance between neurotransmitters that excite and inhibit brain activity — a fundamental cause of depression and other psychiatric disorders.

Draig’s scientists, led by professors John Atack and Simon Ward, have designed new molecules to modulate two key neurotransmitters, glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid (gaba). DT-101 rebalances brain activity by targeting a specific site on nerve cells.

The company plans to recruit around 300 people with major depression for the phase 2 trial of DT-101, which is due to start this year, and to provide a first readout of clinical data in 2027.

“It is a global study including the UK,” said McKernan.

An important tool in Draig’s research is magnetoencephalography (Meg), a relatively new non-invasive imaging technology that measures magnetic fields created by electrical activity in the brain.

“Meg is quite an advantage, because you can get a sense of what is going wrong in the brain — is it overexcited? is it over-inhibited? — through a functional measurement,” said Bingham.

According to the Brain Health Atlas, depression is among the world’s top causes of poor health, affecting 330mn people — an 89 per cent rise on 1990. Existing drugs, particularly the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors most frequently prescribed for major depression, have limited efficacy, are slow to act and can have adverse side effects.

Although the pharmaceutical industry is giving depression more attention after many years of neglect, including new treatments based on ketamine and psychedelic drugs, Draig’s investors are backing its more traditional approach to medicinal chemistry.

The five other funds that joined the round are Access Biotechnology, Canaan Partners, SR One, Sanofi Ventures, Schroders Capital and ICG.

Some people in European life sciences lament the fact that US investors dominate the funding of many of the region’s start-ups, which then go on to IPO on the Nasdaq in New York. US-based funds contributed most of Draig’s Series A funding, but Bingham said that did not worry her.

“I think raising money in the States but building them here is just fine because we’re miles away from being able to compete with Nasdaq,” she said. “The way we keep them as UK companies is to capitalise them properly.”

Can AI tell us how much art is really worth?

New businesses such as Appraisal Bureau are bringing greater efficiency to buying art

Forget the old-school charms of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. Art valuations today are more likely to rely on artificial intelligence to help close the gap between educated guesswork and reality — as much as this mysterious market will allow.

“We are using AI for efficiency. It can process millions of data points instantly, then sort, clean and label the information. It is not ‘ask ChatGPT the value of my art’,” says Caroline Taylor, founder of Appraisal Bureau, a young business headquartered in New York.

Valuing art has long been an inexact business, but it supports industries including insurance, banking and the tax authorities. Insurers and firms that lend against art often stipulate annual valuations, generally conducted on site, while in the US, the Internal Revenue Service requires a qualified appraisal for collectibles worth more than $5,000 to claim generous charitable relief. Lawsuits, notably last year’s failed $377mn damages claim by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev against Sotheby’s, often call on appraisers as expert witnesses. 

“Getting updated valuations is a big headache, collectors just dread it,” says Taylor, a qualified appraiser who previously worked as a private art adviser. She recalls, “I hired one of the big appraisal firms for a client, the process took two and half months, and it cost about $3,000 for a PDF with some auction comps [comparisons to auction prices].” In some cases, Taylor says, reports “were based on only one data source”. Her processes now involve 20 what she calls “ingestion points”, ranging from gallery exhibitions to wider economic indicators, each of which has “millions of data points behind it”.

Appraisal Bureau, which launched in 2021, is gaining ground in the art market. This is as much because of its independence as its technology (unlike other valuation firms, it doesn’t run any art-adjacent businesses such as advisory, lending or sales). “A standalone appraisal company that leverages AI is providing welcome transparency and neutrality to the art market,” says Rebecca Fine, CEO of Athena Art Finance, an independent speciality art lender. 

This month, Appraisal Bureau’s platform will go live with an automated valuation service for collectors. Early adopters include the investment firms Oaktree Capital and Hivemind Capital Partners — the latter runs a fund for digital art, something that Taylor welcomes. “We still have quite a few clients that are NFT [non fungible token] funds, despite what’s happened in those markets.” Here, though, misinformation abounds. Hivemind’s “One One Overflow” (2022), an NFT by Texas generative artist Tyler Hobbs that looks like a broken TV screen, has a “top offer” on the NFT marketplace OpenSea of 0.008 WETH (about $21) — such prices can be posted by anyone, including bots, Taylor says — versus Appraisal Bureau’s six-figure valuation. 

The NFT phenomenon has proved an inspiration to the business. “We look at them to inform how we handle data,” Taylor says. “NFTs have labelled traits that make valuations much easier than for fine art. All the data is on the blockchain, it’s already structured, so on our pipeline we structure fine art in the same way.” She gives an example: “We create labels, like Rashid Johnson ‘Anxious Red’ works sell for better prices than his ‘Blue’ [versions].” 

Other dynamics chime with the shifting demographics of today’s scene. “If you look at the collectible market now, there is more buying at lower levels, which is harder to quantify,” says Charlie Horrell, head of fine art and luxury brands at Marsh Insurance. He finds too that digital art and NFTs are increasingly in the mix — Marsh was the first broker to place a pure NFT policy in the market, he says — while today’s fluctuating market requires more regular revaluations. Overall, he says, “AI gives a clearer idea of insurable value.”

Traditional appraisal firms are also taking note. “When I value a painting, which I do several times a day, I look at the picture, then go on to a database to find other similar works. They won’t be exactly the same, and won’t have sold five days ago, so you have to adjust accordingly, take into account things like different dimensions and the market backdrop. All of this can be sped up by AI,” says Harry Smith, executive chair of Gurr Johns, and an expert witness in the Rybolovlev vs Sotheby’s suit. Smith’s business recently launched a machine-learning-based collections management tool, called Art Metadata, which supplies users with information relevant to their works.

Smith emphasises, though, that once the AI has pooled the data, “the next stage, when looking at the relative quality of one work versus another, has to be done by a specialist. Final judgment requires an expert.” Taylor’s firm also uses qualified appraisers to oversee results. For example, she says, if the data includes a reported sale price from an art fair, “we check with the gallery.”

All the same, AI’s accuracy has vastly improved in just a few years, says Alessandro De Stasio, founder and CEO of online sales and collections management platform Artscapy, which uses an AI-based methodology to offer services including valuations and loans. He compared sales prices from the platform against their AI valuations and found that the machine’s value was correct about 65 per cent of the time in 2022, a year after he launched the business. By 2023 accuracy was at 75 per cent, he reports, and since 2024 this has hit 85 per cent. “The incremental percentage is the one that is increasingly hard to fill with the current models. However, I can see this closing within 18 months,” De Stasio says.

There are, meanwhile, varied valuations in this complicated market. “Retail replacement” is the replacement value of a work (including metrics such as auction house fees) and is generally used by insurers. “Fair market value” represents what a dealer would pay today for a work, and the difference between the two can be as much as 40 per cent, experts say. Auction house estimates, which can look like valuations, are more likely the result of intense negotiations with consignors and can be set deliberately low, for example to encourage bidding. Legal situations sparked by divorce or probate can also affect the preferred levels of pricing.

While precise values might always remain an art, AI’s proponents believe that improving efficiencies and liquidity could help drag the art market’s mechanisms into the 21st century. “AI means we can offer valuations and appraisals at a fraction of the cost and is giving us back a lot of time,” De Stasio says.

For now, though, Smith believes old-school valuation still has its place. “AI is going to make our businesses better, but we are not all out of a job.”

Data sets back hopes that struggling market could stabilise this year

Just days after Premier Li Qiang called for “greater efforts” to halt a decline in China’s housing market, fresh data on Monday laid out why the country’s top leadership still has such cause for concern.

New home prices across 70 Chinese cities fell 0.2 per cent in May from the previous month, while those of second-hand homes declined 0.5 per cent, according to a Financial Times analysis — the fastest pace of decline in seven and eight months respectively.

Real estate investment was also down 10.7 per cent in the first five months of 2025, the data showed.

Years after Chinese home prices started to fall following a series of developer implosions, the prospect of a stabilisation remains in doubt, piling pressure on policymakers as they contend with a weaker economic backdrop.

“A nationwide turnaround looks a distance away,” said Louise Loo, lead economist at Oxford Economics.

Sentiment was buoyed earlier this year by data showing a moderation in falls, and month-on-month growth in prices in tier 1 cities, in a period after Beijing unleashed a series of supportive measures in September.

But any sense of improvement stalled in May, despite a trade war truce with the US.

“Even the primary prices started to see some weakness,” said Karl Choi, head of Greater China real estate research at Bank of America, of the May figures. “That was a bit of a difference from the last few months, when primary prices were relatively stable.”

The setback comes despite numerous government efforts to support the market, including mortgage rate cuts, funds to complete unfinished residential projects and plans to convert unused homes into social housing.

Housing prices are typically measured through sales of new homes, reflecting China’s rapid pace of urbanisation. But the secondary home market was “a more definitive gauge of sentiment, given looser price controls”, said Loo, who noted that second-hand prices were flat or rose in just three of 70 cities tracked by the National Bureau of Statistics in May.

The property market was “still searching for a bottom”, said Jian Chang, chief China economist at Barclays, pointing to recent declines in secondary market prices in big cities following “some stabilisation in March”.

Top cities, where housing is still expensive, have scrapped purchase restrictions to try to restore confidence, with the latest announcement coming from Guangzhou last week. Monthly price changes for new homes in tier-one cities turned negative in May for the first time this year, and fell sharply for second-hand homes.

Other indicators paint a less gloomy picture. Prices are falling less steeply on a year-to-year basis, with new home prices declining 4.1 per cent in May compared with more than 6 per cent in October.

Michelle Kwok, head of Asia real estate research at HSBC, suggested that “things have already started to turn” from the depths of the now four-year crisis. “Big cities are leading the recovery,” she said.

Most economists had not anticipated a return to rising prices for some time, even before the added setback of a full-blown trade war with the US.

“Stabilisation, much less recovery, is not expected in 2025,” said Yuhan Zhang, principal economist at the Conference Board’s China Center. He added that “oversupply remains a serious challenge”, though he noted that inventory levels were expected to rise less quickly than last year.

John Lam, property analyst at UBS, said uncertainty around tariffs had delayed a recovery in tier-one cities in April but stabilisation might still be possible in the fourth quarter. Yi Wang, a Goldman Sachs property analyst, said she did not expect spot prices in the primary or secondary markets to stabilise until the second half of next year.

Further afield, the nationwide picture poses an acute challenge to policymakers. Goldman Sachs on Monday forecast that urban demand for new properties would remain below 5mn units per year in the coming years, down from a peak of 20mn in 2017.

Han Jun, who runs a trade advisory business in the textile manufacturing capital of Keqiao in coastal Zhejiang province, said last month that local housing prices had fallen about one-third from their peak. “They keep going down, and it doesn’t look like it’s turning around,” he said.

Li, in comments that were read out on state broadcaster CCTV, called on policymakers to “focus on the long term”.

But if there are still doubts over China’s richest cities, the recovery remains even more uncertain outside of them.

“We go as far as saying, just write off the lower tier,” said Kwok at HSBC. “We just have to accept that it’s not going to be a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ coming out of this crisis.”

It is the first time in Israel’s 76-year history that its main international airport has been closed without any timeline for reopening

Key Points

Israelis are struggling to return home after hostilities between Israel and Iran closed Israeli airspace.

Many are seeking alternative routes via boat, Jordan, and Egypt, facing high costs and uncertainty.

Limited emergency flights are expected to begin, prioritizing security personnel and medical emergencies.

When Shay Bialik and her husband, Ido Dembin, left their nine month-old baby to attend an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in Paris, they thought surely they’d be back in time for a meeting with doctors to discuss a surgery that could give their deaf daughter a chance to hear. But a few hours after they landed, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran. Its skies are now closed indefinitely.

“I would swim to Israel to make sure we make it on time,” said Dembin.

The couple are now among more than 100,000 Israelis scrambling to find a way back home as their loved ones are under regular bombardment from Iranian ballistic missiles.

Israelis have crowded into nearby countries, like Cyprus and Greece, hoping to be in place for a flight as soon as they start back up again.

Some aren’t waiting for airlines. They are chartering boats of any kind—yachts, large passenger ships, tugboats—from Cyprus to Israel. Tickets can cost thousands of dollars for a single seat. Groups in Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram have sprouted to help connect Israelis to these pricey options. Neat excel sheets show names, numbers, locations and prices of seats. Others, if they can get tickets, are flying into Egypt and Jordan and crossing land borders back into Israel.

This is the first time Israel’s airspace has been closed this long in its 76 year history, and it remains unclear when it will reopen. Many Israelis say they have felt abandoned by their government, which appeared to have no effective plan in place to help those stranded abroad once the surprise attack began.

Yaakov Katz, an American-Israeli journalist who wrote a book called “Israel Vs. Iran,” found himself caught up in the conflict when his flight to Tel Aviv from London on Thursday night was rerouted to Paphos, Cyprus.

The plane waited on the tarmac for hours before one of the crew announced they would disembark and it would be “every man for himself.” The announcement caused a few passengers to hyperventilate, and they required oxygen masks, Katz said.

After a few days, Katz booked a flight to Amman, Jordan. But before his flight left for Jordan, he received a call offering him a spot on a small tugboat leaving Cyprus with room for nine passengers and four crewmen. He quickly jumped in a cab and paid 1,500 euros for a seat, worth $1,720. As the boat moved through the sea, it traveled straight in the direction of exploding missiles lighting up the nighttime sky, he recalled.

“There is a war here and I want to be with my family,” said Katz, speaking from Israel. “There is no other place to be in the world except next to them.”

On Tuesday, the country’s transportation minister, Miri Regev, said the government had a “phased, organized” plan set in place before it launched the attack on Iran. She said Israeli planes had been ordered to leave Israel’s territory as soon as the first bombing run began, and directed to destinations in Europe and the U.S. where Israelis would be expected to congregate for return flights. She said the next phase would allow only incoming flights and give priority to members of security services and reservists who need to return for duty, as well as those who need to come home for medical or family emergencies.

“There is nothing to be worried about. If you are abroad, enjoy,” Regev said in remarks on Monday.

The comment infuriated many Israelis struggling to get home.

“The Ministry of Transportation is saying just enjoy yourself while abroad and our children are in mortal danger. That is delusional,“ said Aliza Landes, 42, a mother of two.

When she had tried early in the week to book a flight on the website for Israel’s El Al airlines, there were more than 20,000 people in front of her.

“It is the same process but more chaotic than buying a Burning Man ticket,” she said, referring to the popular desert festival. She booked a flight to Aqaba, Jordan, that was canceled, and now she’s looking for another way home from Cyprus.

While Israelis were trying to get back into the country, tourists were scrambling to get out.

One of the largest groups of tourists in Israel when the attack started of were participants on Birthright, a program that brings Jews from around the world to visit and learn about Israel.

The organization rented a luxury Israeli cruise ship to take 2,800 people, largely but not exclusively Americans, from Israel’s Ashdod Port to Larnaca, Cyprus, under the close protection of the Israeli Navy. The organization said the boat would be used to help Israelis get back to Israel for the return trip. The first batch of 1,500 left for Cyprus Tuesday morning.

From Cyprus, the group will board four planes chartered by Florida—an initiative led by the Gov. Ron DeSantis—and land in Tampa, from where they will fly to their respective hometowns.

Emergency flights back into Israel are expected to begin on Wednesday, but will be limited to a handful of planes that can carry around a total of 2,000 people daily. There is no clear timeline for when departures will restart.

For many Israelis like Bialik and Dembin, the future is still uncertain. They managed to get one-way tickets from Paris to Tel Aviv for 800 euros each, but their flight isn’t for another week and depends on the volatile security situation.

Meanwhile, their daughter is staying with her grandparents in Rehovot, a town in central Israel where the couple also lives. A ballistic missile landed near enough to their home on Sunday to shatter windows.

“I miss her very much,” Bialik said of her daughter. “It is part of your heart that you can’t see or protect.

European Commission suggests cutting minimum risk weights after pressure from industry and former ECB president Mario Draghi

The European Commission has proposed overhauling EU debt securitisation rules that were put in place in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, in an effort to free up bank capital and encourage lending.

The commission on Tuesday put forward plans for lowering capital charges for banks holding securitised assets and cutting red tape for investors and issuers. The measures form part of Brussels’ broader push to integrate the EU’s capital markets, which is seen as critical to boosting the continent’s flagging economic competitiveness.

Political will for a revision of the bloc’s prudential framework, viewed by many in the market as too restrictive, follows calls for a revamp last year by Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister and ex-president of the European Central Bank, and a mandate from EU leaders last year for “relaunching the European securitisation market, including through regulatory and prudential changes, using available room for manoeuvre”.

Investors have also urged politicians to reform the market — where assets such as corporate debt, car loans and mortgage borrowing are packaged up into securities that banks can sell to investors — claiming this could attract hundreds of billions of euros of financing for the bloc’s economy.

Maria Luís Albuquerque, EU financial services commissioner, said: “Today’s proposals will contribute to reviving the EU securitisation market by simplifying and enhancing our regulatory and prudential framework while preserving robust safeguards to ensure financial stability.”

“I clearly expect [banks] to use this fit-for-purpose framework to provide more funding to households and business.”

At the heart of the proposed changes are reductions to the minimum risk weights — how much capital a bank must hold against potential losses — for certain classes of securitised assets, particularly for high-quality tranches that meet the EU’s “simple, transparent and standardised” (STS) criteria for securitisation.

Under the current rules, senior positions in STS securitisations are subject to a minimum risk weight of 10 per cent. The commission is proposing halving that to 5 per cent, while the floor for senior non-STS tranches would drop from 15 per cent currently to 10 to 12 per cent.

A second major proposed adjustment concerns the formula for calculating banks’ capital requirements for securitisation exposures under existing EU regulation — the so-called p factor.

Critics have long argued the current formula unfairly inflates capital charges for certain classes of securitised assets. The proposal seeks to address this by reducing the p factor for senior STS tranches from 0.5 to 0.3, and for senior non-STS tranches from 1.0 to 0.6 — representing 40 per cent reductions.

Adam Farkas, chief executive of the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, said it was “encouraging that the commission’s proposals acknowledge the current lack of sufficient risk sensitivity of the capital framework”.

Separate proposals for insurers’ capital charges, viewed by the industry as holding back demand for securitised debt, are due in late July.

However, critics say the commission’s proposals undermine financial stability and international standards designed to prevent a repeat of the global financial crisis.

“What they propose is effectively going below the Basel standards,” said Julia Symon, head of research at non-profit Finance Watch. “The Basel accord was the only standard we had, and it had already been a compromise, now we’re going to dilute it.”

But EU officials defended the plans.

“The view we’re taking is we’re introducing a dimension of risk sensitiveness . . . to a standard which at the moment is very conservative. It’s in line with the spirit and the logic of the Basel standard,” said one official.

Brussels’ proposed tweaks to the securitisation framework also include a reduction in due diligence obligations for institutional investors, especially in cases where third-party due diligence has already been conducted by the issuer.

“Disclosure rules and transparency rules are going too far,” another EU official said, arguing the changes should insure that the bloc does not “impose costs on issuers [that are] not worthwhile”.

The reforms would also simplify reporting templates for issuers, aligning them more closely with existing ECB guidelines. The commission proposes allowing private securitisations — those not publicly listed — to report less granular data, while public transactions would remain subject to higher transparency thresholds.

Jillien Flores, chief of advocacy at the Managed Funds Association, which represents one-third of global hedge fund assets, said: “Streamlining these requirements will reduce unnecessary costs, support market participation and help attract more global capital into EU securitisation markets.”

The commission’s proposals follow years of complaints from market participants that Europe’s securitisation regime is too burdensome and conservative compared with jurisdictions such as the US, where securitisation plays a much larger role in funding.

Prior to the global financial crisis, the EU’s securitisation market was 87 per cent of the size of the US market. It is now down to 17 per cent, according to asset manager PGIM.

Taggart Davis, head of government affairs for Europe at PGIM, said: “We can’t unlearn the lessons of the financial crisis, we need to be careful about what happened there, but we also have to be confident that we have learnt our lessons, and perhaps we can engineer a system which embeds those lessons in the regulation but without starving market growth.”

The proposals must gather the support of a majority of EU countries and clear the European parliament — a process that could take months.

One month after the House passed its version of a reconciliation bill, Senate Republicans released their take on the budget bill Monday night.

The Senate Finance Committee’s language would take a sledgehammer to some parts of the renewable-friendly Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) while sparing others.

Solar, wind, and hydrogen bear the brunt of the impact. On the other side of the ledger, geothermal, nuclear, hydropower, and long-duration energy storage emerge relatively unscathed. Carbon capture ended up somewhere in the middle.

Senate Republicans are moving to swiftly end residential solar tax credits, giving people just 180 days after the bill is signed to claim them. Solar leasing companies would become ineligible for any credits, knocking out another leg from under the residential solar market.

Incentives for commercial wind and solar would see a longer timeline, though not nearly as generous as those under the IRA, which extend through 2032. The full credit would be available to projects that begin within six months of the bill’s signing. After that, they receive 60% of the credit if they commence construction in 2026 and 20% if they do so in 2027. The tax credit disappears after that.

Hydrogen tax credits would end this year, matching the version that passed in the House. The move adds yet another hurdle for hydrogen startups, which have been buffeted by continually shifting policies over the years.

Carbon capture was spared, though the details would change. The main 45Q tax credit currently differentiates between uses of the captured carbon, with companies using it for enhanced oil recovery receiving less money, for example. The Senate GOP’s language does away with the distinction, making all carbon capture projects eligible for the same incentives.

Other technologies like nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower receive a slight extension of the phase-out of tax credits. Now, projects that begin construction in 2033 receive the full credit, one year longer than the IRA. It begins to phase out thereafter, dropping to 75% of the tax credit in 2034 and 50% in 2035 before disappearing in 2036.

The moves are largely in line with GOP priorities to kneecap wind and solar while preserving nuclear and geothermal. The lifeline for long-duration energy storage was perhaps the most surprising addition, and if it makes it through the reconciliation process intact, it could indirectly boost wind and solar by making them more appealing as 24/7 sources.

This isn’t the last word, though. The bill can’t be signed by President Donald Trump as is. First, it must pass the Senate parliamentarian before heading to the House, which has set a July 4 deadline to pass the full package.