Rumours are circulating that the European Union wants to set up a capital markets super-regulator with the aim of helping it temporise with its sovereign debt crisis by raising funds on the capital markets.

Reports in the European press are suggesting that Lord Hill, the European Union's commissioner for markets, is planning to consult interested parties in the summer about the setting-up of a new, centralised super-regulator for capital markets.

His department is being reticent about the plans. The European news service EurActiv, however, is expecting a paper to be published as early as this month.

It was last year that Lord Hill took over the brief for financial stability, financial services and capital markets union after a surprise nomination by Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission, the nearest thing the EU has to an executive branch. He was famously grilled by EU members of parliament about which oath he took seriously - the one he made to HM the Queen or the one he was making to the EU. He replied that he saw no contradiction between the two.

Like all European Commissioners, Lord Hill is required to be 'independent' of the national interests he once swore to uphold. He must instead act in the EU's general interests, which many believe are incompatible with those of the City of London.

Europe Economics, in a report for Business for Britain, found that the UK would not have introduced half of all major EU financial laws had it been outside the European Union. France, Germany and the UK have all opposed the idea of a super-regulator, according to quotations from Olivier Guersent, a senior civil servant in the EU executive's capital markets union directorate.